


Bass Guitars and Grandad's Ashes

by LastOneFromHometown



Category: Adventure Time
Genre: AU, Angst, Ex-Girlfriends, F/F, Road Trip, they will get together i promise, this is possibly the stupidest thing i've written yet
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-28
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-14 03:47:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 34,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29039613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LastOneFromHometown/pseuds/LastOneFromHometown
Summary: The worst place to run into your ex-girlfriend is probably at your grandad's funeral. But it turns out Bonnie has somewhere she needs to go, and Marceline is desperate to run away for the summer, so they set off together on a road trip across the country.Absolutely nothing could go wrong.
Relationships: Princess Bubblegum & Marceline, Princess Bubblegum/Marceline
Comments: 31
Kudos: 51





	1. Bass Guitars and Grandad's Ashes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> some general content warnings: i use the word fuck sort of frequently. there's some strong sex references and light-to-mild violence, which means there's also blood and stuff.

It was June. A beautiful day like any other. The trees shone youthful and green in the sun with cool blue shadows fluttering beneath them. White cabbage butterflies rested on the lichen-covered headstones in the church yard; people had gathered there that day, with the bells in the tower ringing their bright, mournful tone, for Bonnie’s grandfather’s funeral. Family, friends, and friends of friends, standing around in dark suits and dresses to commemorate the memory of a man made into ash. Eventually, as the ringing came to a close, they filtered in and took their seats. Bonnie was already inside.

At the front of the church was a table set up with framed pictures of her grandfather. Surrounding them heavy pink and white wreathes of flowers and in the centre of the display stood the simple ceramic urn within which what left of her grandad’s physical being remained. A person’s whole life, incinerated and condensed into an over-glorified Tupperware box.

The eulogy was not given by her father but instead Simon, an increasingly senile man who was one of grandad’s closest companions during his last twenty years of living. Unfortunately, his body was failing him, and whilst his eulogy was sincere and deeply emotional, Bonnie wasn’t sure if she was crying because of the sentiment or because of the terrible stenches Simon kept making. The old man could not stop farting.

‘Chad was a kind man,’ Simon continued. There were tears glistening in his eyes, amplified by his enormous thick glasses. ‘I will never forget the lessons he taught me, whether—’ another flatulence, as poisonous and loud as the rest— ‘It was how to live my life, or how to score women. Which, I will admit, he was always more successful at than me.’ There was a brief groan. Simon continued.

When the service was over Bonnie’s parents bid a brief and sombre goodbye to everyone then took her into the back room of the church where a kettle sat on a fold-up table next to a small, grumbling fridge. The blinds on the windows were still shut. They asked her to sit down on a dust-covered armchair. From the nervous looks her parents were giving her, Bonnie knew this would not be good news.

‘Look, Bonnie, sweetie,’ her mother began. She was trying to be gentle. Her father interrupted.

‘We need you to take grandad’s ashes to Butterscotch Bay and scattered them there,’ he blurted. Her mother looked at him with disdain.

‘What?’ Bonnie muttered. Her throat was still clogged up with tears.

‘Honey, I know how close you and grandad Chad were, and he asked specifically to be scattered there. I thought it would be good for you. It would give you some closure, you know?’ her mother said softly, taking Bonnie’s hand in hers.

‘Also it’s a long trip and we’re too busy with work to do it. If it were up to me I’d sing _Old Langsyne_ and flush the dust down the toilet. It all ends up in the same place, right? But the old man had to make things difficult,’ her father said, this time earning cold looks from both his wife and his daughter. He had never been the most emotionally intelligent man.

‘I don’t even have a car,’ Bonnie said.

‘You’ll figure it out, sweetie. I’m so sorry to dump this on you now, but we really have to get going. I’ll call you later to talk about it, ok?’ Bonnie’s mother stooped down and hugged her head. Bonnie knew that her mother would forget to call, and once again she’d have to do everything herself. Then they left, and Bonnie buried her face in her hands and started to sob once more.

It was going to be a long summer.

Marceline was waiting for Simon. She felt bad smoking in the church yard so she waited outside the iron fence. Finn was with her leaning over from the opposite side. He was all soul-search-y and weird after the service, even though he barely knew Chad. Nothing Marceline could say would have reached him through the crystal glaze in which he was smothered. So they stood in silence.

She looked up and down the street, on edge, searching for faces in the cars that drove past. It was a sleepy Sunday; there was hardly anyone around. And surely no one would have the nerve to chase her down to a funeral. Even so, she was eager to get a move on. The sooner she could get out of here, the better. She needed to take a good, long drive away from town for the summer until things cooled down. Then she would figure it out from there. The longer she stayed in place the greater the risk she ran of having it all slip through her fingers. 

Finn went home with his older brother. Sick of cigarettes and sulking around outside the church yard, Marceline went inside to look for Simon. Unfortunately, on her way in, the church door swung open at her, whacking her in the face.

‘Ow, shit!’ Marceline hissed.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ was all the door-opener had to say. Marceline looked up to see that it was Bonnie, her eyes raw from crying, and her anger was replaced by a sharp embarrassment. She had clocked that she was at the service, which made sense considering she was Chad’s only grandchild, but she had not wanted to run into her. A funeral was hardly the greatest place to run into your ex-girlfriend. Especially when she was carrying her grandad’s ashes in one arm.

‘Yeah, it’s me,’ Marceline said as Bonnie helped her to her feet. There was dirt up the back of her trousers. That was fine; she wasn’t planning on going to any more funerals very soon. ‘Have you seen Simon?’

Bonnie gave her the same old strange look she always did. Marceline sometimes thought she was trying to read her mind. ‘Yeah,’ Bonnie said, ‘he’s inside talking to the vicar.’

‘Thanks.’ Both of them were completely silent. God, this was awkward. ‘How have you been?’

‘Well, fine, you know, apart from,’—she sniffed— ‘my grandad dying.’

‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ Marceline said. She was clenching her fists in her pockets and kicking the ground. _What a pointless thing to say_. She could hardly look Bonnie in the eye.

‘You brushed your hair,’ Bonnie said.

‘I did.’

‘It looks nice.’

‘Thanks.’

Another silence.

‘I should get going,’ Bonnie said at last, and Marceline realised she had been standing in her way.

‘Yeah, sure,’ Marceline said, then: ‘if you need anything let me know, okay? Give me a call, or…text me… maybe.’

Bonnie gave her a pained nod. What more could she say? Sorry your grandad and closest family member died of natural causes? Marceline couldn’t have broken the air between them with the ice axe that killed Trotsky.

It was the evening of the same day when Marceline’s phone rang. She had to dig through the huge pile of crap on her bed to find it. With one eye shut, she turned it over to see who was calling her. It was Bonnie. It was uncertain if that was better or worse than what she was expecting.

‘Um, hello,’ Bonnie said. ‘Are you busy?’

Marceline looked around her bedroom. Her stuff had been dragged out and was strewn all over the floor. The bathroom was in a similar amount of chaos, only with more strands of hair and unwashed towels everywhere, as well as a bass guitar in its original hard case in the bathtub. The bedroom door was open, so she could see into the depressingly bare living room, where a single red sofa sat faced a blank wall because she had never bothered to get a television. Marceline was in the process of getting the fuck out. Anyone searching her flat would think she had fled the country. The possibility had occurred to her.

‘No,’ Marceline said. This was completely false. She had never been busier in her life. She had never before stolen a legendary bass guitar, nor had she been in the position of being hunted down for it. She looked again nervously at the black case in the bath. It had already caused her whole new worlds of trouble. But Bonnie was an old friend, sort of, and Marceline knew it was hard to be alone when you were grieving.

‘I know it’s kind of weird.’ What a great way to start, Marceline thought. ‘But grandad Chad got me some tickets for the football game at the stadium tonight. I know… I know you’re not really into sports, but I really don’t want to go alone. Do you want to go with me and maybe get something to eat before? It might be nice to catch up,’ she added. Marceline was almost certain that it wouldn’t be. But what kind of heartless monster was she if she said no to that? She wondered how far down the list of people to ask Marceline had been. For all she knew everyone else in Bonnie’s contacts had already let her down. For fuck’s sake, she thought, of course this would be happening now. She’d finally tracked down Hank Handsome’s bass guitar and Bonnie had waltzed right back into her life. But it was just one evening. ‘Sure. I’ll be around yours in about an hour and we can go into town. Are you at your parents’?’

Marceline packed the car up with everything she couldn’t bear to go without for a few months. She would get out of town the second the match was over and she had dropped Bonnie home. The bass guitar was stowed away last, hidden under a false panel in the trunk of the car, and locked there.

All she had to do was watch a little bit of football and have dinner with her ex-girlfriend. That wouldn’t be hard, right? Everything would be fine.

In a slightly grubby pizza restaurant in the centre of town, Bonnie sat opposite Marceline, wondering if this was better than sitting at home and crying to herself. They sat on tall stools at a greasy metal table under fluorescent lighting that allowed Bonnie to see her reflection in the window out the front. She remembered the last few years when she’d think about Marceline in passing, wondering how she was, never having the guts to call, not always missing her but missing the company she had, missing her being there. How long had it been since they’d last seen each other? Three years? Almost four? It didn’t matter, Marceline was hardly any different. Maybe prettier, more angular; she looked more dangerous. But everything else was more or less the same. This included, to Bonnie’s great disappointment, a lack of improvement when it came to Marceline’s driving.

‘So,’ Marceline said, her mouth half-full of pizza crust, ‘your parents left you to take your grandad’s ashes all the way to Butterscotch Bay?’

‘Yep. They’ve just given me a load of cash and told me to go do it. But I don’t have a car and it’s a long way to go on my own. I understand why they can’t do it, but it’s just, like, why me?’

Marceline nodded. At the very least, there was very little explaining to do. She already knew Bonnie’s family dynamics inside out. She’d braved the dull silences of dinner at their kitchen table so many times that Bonnie knew, at some point, Marceline must have loved her. Because no one would do that if it weren’t for a good reason, like love, or masochism, or idiocy. Actually, Bonnie thought, maybe those are all bad reasons.

‘What about you?’ Bonnie asked. ‘What have you got all that stuff packed up in your car for?’

‘Road trip.’ Eloquent as ever.

‘Where to?’

‘Not sure yet.’ As casual as ever, too.

It suddenly occurred to Bonnie to just ask Marceline to drive her to Butterscotch Bay. But it was a lot of time to spend together. And for all Bonnie knew, if Marceline wasn’t planning to go to be alone, was planning to go with someone else. She kept the question in. 

Bonnie only managed to eat half her pizza. After a short and nostalgic argument, they decided to split the bill fifty-fifty. It was a ten minute walk to the stadium, passing the curry place her grandfather used to take her to before matches. The games were never for big teams with big sponsorships, and were sometimes very boring, but Bonnie had bonded with her grandfather over them. He always got them the same seats so they could have the best view of the local act performing at half-time; he’d always tell her the same story about the jazz band he played drums for when he was a teenager, and how he’d met her grandmother at a music hall where they were playing; he’d always listen to what Bonnie had to say when few other people did. Her parents were too busy for her, once she and Marceline broke up she realised how lonely being lonely was, and between that and studying for her degree Bonnie hadn’t had the time to make friends. Conversely, grandad Chad could not have had more time on his hands. Even if he didn’t understand what Bonnie was talking about, they were on the same level. Now, she’d go to the game he had bought them tickets for, and have Marceline sit in his seat. It was weird enough to make her skin scrawl.

The match wasn’t too boring. Marceline enjoyed the parts where some of the players started fighting each other. The stadium was maybe two-thirds full at best. At half-time the score was 1-1 and people waited in their seats for the band to come out onto the pitch. A huge platform like a trolley had been wheeled out, long cables dragging behind it on the grass. On it were multiple large amplifiers and a rusty old drum kit. All but one of the floodlights were shut off to mimic the effect of a spotlight. Marceline, uninterested in seeing some college kids half-heartedly make their way through Blink-182 and Green Day songs for twenty minutes, got up to use the bathroom. The queue at the women’s was long and she had plenty of time to spare, but even from the bathroom she could hear the distant disorganised noise of the off tempo smacking of cymbals and basslines that staggered like blackout drunks.

It wasn’t until Marceline sat down next to Bonnie that she realised who was playing. Barely twenty-feet away were the five members of The Missed Takes: a bad excuse for a tribute band to the legendary rock group The Stakes. All in their mid-forties, at least. There was King, the overweight, long-haired blond frontman who wailed his way through the lyrics to The Stakes’ greatest hits, tarnishing Marceline’s memory of them forever. The guitarist, if you could call her that, was Empress; a gaunt woman who looked like she had been stretched on a medieval torture device, who Marceline had never seen without a bandana and a pair of sunglasses. Then there was Moon, the silent bassist with greasy hair, who never spoke and who, Marceline was pretty certain, slept in a jar; Hierophant, the old-fashioned scumbag drummer who liked his fur coats and leather riding boots, and Phil. Phil maybe have played the keyboard. He had one tooth.

King had spotted Marceline. It wasn’t exactly hard. Bonnie’s tickets had sat them right in front of the pitch, looking straight at them. There was wickedness was spread all across his face. They had found her. Shit.

‘Um, I feel, like, uh, really sick,’ Marceline said. A rush of nausea had washed over her, it wasn’t exactly untrue. Bonnie gave her a puzzled look. ‘I ate, um, too much pizza.’ What else, what else would convince her? ‘I just shit myself, too.’

‘Oh, um,’ Bonnie said, her voice raised over the droning mess of the music.

‘I’d like to leave. Right now.’ The Missed Takes’ set was ending. ‘Yeah. I’d also like to run. You know, I really find running as fast as I possibly can to help with nausea sometimes.’

‘That doesn’t sound healthy.’

‘Yeah, but everyone’s different, right?’ Marceline said. ‘But I need to go, like, right now, or I might, uh, shit myself again.’

‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ Bonnie asked.

‘No, Bonnie! I just shit myself. I’m going,’ Marceline barked, hopping up and down back towards the exit.

‘Then I’m coming too, I’m not sitting here on my own. Besides, I need you to drive me home.’ Bonnie, excruciatingly slowly, picked up her things. Marceline felt like slamming her face into a concrete wall. Shit. Shit, shit, shit.

When Bonnie finally stood up Marceline grabbed her by the wrist and began to sprint out of the stadium. Where would they go? They couldn’t go to the car, that’s where the bass was. Marceline didn’t want to lead King right to the prize. For all he knew she had locked it up in a vault somewhere. No, they just needed to make sure they had lost them before they went back to the car.

Marceline knew it would be a mistake to tell Bonnie about the bass. It was the bass guitar of Hank Handsome, one of the four legendary members of The Stakes. He had bought the bass from Marceline’s father in the eighties right when The Stakes got signed—Marceline couldn’t believe her father would give the bass away, but that was a whole other problem—and it was the only object that had survived The Stakes’ final performance, which went up in flames, literally. According to legend, Bobby Beautiful died playing the deadliest guitar solo that will ever be known to man, shredding on even when he was engulfed by the blaze. After that the band broke up and went their separate ways. Hank Handsome’s bass guitar disappeared. Marceline didn’t know how King had gotten his hands on it, but she didn’t care. It was hers now. If they didn’t catch her.

She dragged Bonnie halfway around the stadium and out into the street. Halfway down the hill she looked back up to see Moon and Hierophant on their tail. Moon was sickeningly fast. Her legs weren’t moving like those of a normal person. Marceline pulled Bonnie around a sharp corner before she could see they were being chased.

There was an ice rink on the next block over. Perfect, Marceline thought, it was a Friday night, it would be full of people.

‘Let’s go ice skating,’ Marceline ordered.

Bonnie was uncertain where they were going or why. Had Marceline got the wrong idea and thought this was some kind of romantic escapade? No, that was impossible. Not even Marceline would flirt with someone after their grandad’s funeral. And Bonnie’s idea of a romantic evening didn’t usually involve her date admitting she’d shit herself. All that stuff between them was in the past, anyway. They were just two normal friends. Normal friends doing normal friend things. Friends. Nothing wrong with that. Except Bonnie had never run this fast and this hard in her life, and now they were putting on blue plastic boots to go ice skating.

‘I can’t ice skate,’ she said to Marceline for the sixth time. Marceline yet again didn’t hear her. Oh well, at least she might be able to take her mind of grandad Chad for a while.

The rink was old and falling apart at the edges. A public project from the eighties, with old, yellowed Coca-Cola ads peeling off the walls, out of date fixture schedules on the noticeboards, and paint peeling off the benches. Bonnie had been before, years ago with school friends. It had felt like fun then, now it was just and old sad sack of a building and a popular place to break your wrist.

It was disco night at the ice rink. And when the ice rink advertised a disco, they meant garish flashing lights and a playlist of pop music that repeated itself every hour and a half. The rink was packed. Bonnie knew this was a bad idea. Marceline had a hold of her hand as she tried to step onto the ice, and soon they were lost in the crowd of families with squealing children and teenagers on dates. If she fell over, she’d probably take at least four other people down with her.

Unfortunately, Marceline was graceful enough on the ice to make Bonnie feel embarrassed about herself. She was just getting her confidence, building up the will to let go of Marceline’s hand, when the song changed to the Ronettes’ _Be My Baby_ and mass panic broke out across the ice rink.

There was yelling, and screaming, but the music didn’t stop. Bonnie was thinking: what do people have against this song? Until she turned around. Two of the monstrous machines they used to resurface the ice had been unleashed like hungry wolves onto a flock of helpless, slippery sheep. Bonnie had the breath torn out of her lungs. Next to her, Marceline swore.

They were in the middle of the ice. The two Zambonis flanked either side of the oval, the exits were crowded, and with the Perspex sheet on top of the barrier meant there was no escape. The disco lights stopped, but the music blared on, the rink staff running around frantically. Their efforts were fruitless.

One of the Zambonis sized them up like a morsels of fresh meat.

‘Keep your knees bent!’ Marceline said. She pushed Bonnie away across the ice, sliding them both out of the machine’s path.

The speakers blared: ‘ _Be my, be my baby._ ’ Bonnie watched as Marceline climbed up onto the Zamboni to where the man clad in a fur coat sat in the driver’s seat. She hit him in the face, jerked the wheel to the side, and ripped the keys out of the ignition. It was almost heroic until jumped off backwards to fall on her arse.

‘ _I’ll make you happy baby… just wait and see_ ,’ sang the Ronettes.

Having staggered to her feet, Marceline skated over to Bonnie and quickly slid them both towards the exits. There was a cacophony of yelling, of panic, of desperate cries from the employees as the two resurfacing machines smashed into each other, their vigilante drivers swearing, and black smoke pouring out from under the crumpled metal.

‘ _Be my, be my baby… my one and only, baby,’_ went on and on, spiralling in the background. Marceline slid them clumsily off the ice.

‘Wait here, I’ll be right back,’ Marceline said, leaving Bonnie standing on the wet floor in her socks. Her feet were sore and her head was spinning. Marceline returned with their shoes and Bonnie’s bag.

Marceline was eager to sprint back to the car in the stadium parking lot, and wasted no time in driving away. She made three wrong turns on the way back to Bonnie’s. 

Pulled up in the driveway, Bonnie looked up at the hollow husk that was her parents’ house. Quiet and empty, uninhabited, where pictures of her grandfather rested on the mantlepiece, where her childhood bed still stood in the same corner of her bedroom with all of her old schoolbooks shoved underneath it, and her old lab equipment was still piled up in boxes in the garage.

She had to ask. It would be such a waste if she didn’t ask.

‘Can I come with you on your trip? I know it’s sudden. But all you’d have to do is drive me to Butterscotch Bay and I could find another way home. I’ll split the cost of the gas with you. And we could share the driving.’

Marceline hesitated. Bonnie changed her method of persuasion. ‘I don’t know when I’ll be able to go another time. It’s a long way, and I’m starting my post-grad course in September so it could be months or even years until I get to go. I don’t even have my own car. You know what my grandad meant to me. Please, Marceline.’ Bonnie reached over and took Marceline’s hand, smoothing over her knuckles with her thumb. Marceline was unreadable; the second they had broken up all those years ago, Marceline had become a mystery to Bonnie once again. She had no clue what Marceline might say in those strained moments. Marceline owed her nothing and had never had a problem with doing things alone before. Bonnie’s heart sank as she realised it was incredibly likely Marceline was about to say no.

‘Okay,’ Marceline sighed. Bonnie tried not to shout with relief. ‘But only if you pack your stuff right now. And we leave the second you’re done.’

‘Yes, fine, fantastic.’ She didn’t care. It didn’t even cross her mind, in that moment, that Marceline was acting strangely. She skipped to the house, her shaky excitement making it a struggle to get the key to turn in the lock. For the first time since grandad Chad had died, she thought that everything might be fine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! Will hopefully be updating this weekly.


	2. Exposition, Corn Fields, and Bad Milk

King sat alone in the band room. It was his mother’s basement, but really, after all these years, it was his. Moon’s slimy drum kit was there, their old posters were mounted and framed on the walls. Pictures from twenty years ago of the five of them in sparkly spandex suits that allowed you to see all too much. And the space on the wall that belonged to Hank Handsome’s bass.

He had spent his adult life searching for the bass from the legend. When the three remaining members of The Stakes, the greatest band to have ever rocked the Earth, disbanded and disappeared, Hank Handsome’s bass guitar had fallen into a shroud of mystery. Handsome was nowhere to be found, neither was the angelically chiselled singer, George Gorgeous. Even their down-to-earth drummer Simon Sexy turned into thin air. The years went by, and in time all that was left of the band were their stories and their music. But the next generation would never understand The Stakes like King did. King had seen them play seventeen times before he was twenty-two, in three different continents. He had been there at the end, he had heard Bobby Beautiful’s godly last solo. Sure, Empress and the others cared about The Stakes, and they cared about the bass guitar, but King knew they weren’t as serious as he was. As far as he was concerned, getting that bass back was a matter of life or death. It was only a matter of time until he got his hands around the neck that snivelling smart-arsed punk, Marceline Abadeer. She had no idea what the bass was worth, what it could do, or what it meant to him.

King looked at the empty space on the wall, the metal bracket that would soon hold the neck of the most magical, most epic, most insanely bonkers bass guitar that had ever existed or ever would exist.

Marceline Abadeer would meet his wrath.

Bonnie woke up to the sound of wind whistling through the open windows. Marceline was doing seventy down the highway. The sky was spotlessly blue. Long, flat fields of bright yellows and greens surrounded them, sprawling out in every direction, the road shining cool greys and pinks in the morning sun. It beamed down onto them like angels’ kisses, glinting in the dark tint of Marceline’s sunglasses. The fallen strands from her loose ponytail rippled around her. Music played faintly through the car stereo, crooning guitars and feverish vibratos of a country song. It was not an unpleasant way to wake up, Bonnie realised. It was a strange kind of heaven.

‘Morning, princess,’ Marceline said, glancing over. Bonnie stretched out in her seat, her whole body like a bag of stones from being cramped up in the car. The dashboard said it was eight o’clock.

‘How long have you been driving for?’ she yawned.

‘It’s cool, I’m pretty much semi-nocturnal anyway. I should be good at least for another hour,’ Marceline said, switching lanes without indicating. A truck driver honked at her and she shoved her hand out the open window to flip him off. Bonnie tried to shake off the thought that Marceline could have easily killed them in the night. 

‘Let’s pull over, I feel like stretching my legs,’ Bonnie said.

At the next junction Marceline came off the highway and they loitered around the service station for a while, walking around, buying coffee and cheap pastries for breakfast, refilling the car, and using the toilet. Bonnie saw Marceline attempting to sneakily smoke a cigarette when she thought she wasn’t watching. So much for quitting before she turned twenty, she thought.

Marceline was eager to keep moving and let Bonnie take a turn driving. The car was a muscly looking blue Chevrolet. An eighteenth birthday present, Bonnie remembered bitterly, from Marceline’s sickeningly wealthy Dad. It drove like a puck gliding over an air hockey table.

Marceline slept for a good two hours. They swapped once more at midday. This was a mistake, Bonnie realised, because not only did Marceline’s driving make her fear for her life but obeyed an impulse to turn off the highway and soon they had no idea where they were.

‘It’s fine, let’s just keep going,’ Marceline said.

‘It’s not fine,’ Bonnie complained, ‘We’re lost, and I’d rather not pee behind a bush. And last I checked all the food you packed was a loaf of bread and some tomatoes.’

‘What? It’s what I had in the fridge.’ Bonnie was slightly concerned how much Marceline’s fun road trip was starting to look a lot like running away. ‘And you’re going to have to get used to being lost. I agreed to take you to Butterscotch Bay, but I didn’t promise you anything else,’ Marceline replied.

‘Do you at least have a map in the car?’ Bonnie sighed.

A wicked smirk spread across her face. ‘That would ruin all the fun, wouldn’t it?’

Bonnie turned around to look in the backseat, where grandad Chad was furled up in bubble wrap and nestled in a cardboard box she had insisted on tying to the seat, and where, Bonnie remembered with a wince, they’d had sex after her dog died. The memory came to her like a bus running a red light at an intersection.

It was going to be a long drive to Butterscotch Bay.

They spent at least an hour following up winding country roads. They passed a few small towns, offering very little, and then there was miles and miles of nothing except road and never-ending cornfields. Sick of driving and desperate to pee in a real toilet, Marceline pulled into the driveway of a large farmhouse that overlooked its own cornfield. The wind had died. Everything was still.

‘What are you doing?’ Bonnie asked her.

‘I’m just going to knock and say hello. We’re two girls on a drive in the middle of nowhere. We’re hardly threatening. If they say no that’s ok. You can’t cry over milk that hasn’t been spilt.’

Marceline watched Bonnie’s face crumple in confusion. ‘I don’t think that’s—you know what, never mind.’

The house was tall, mostly red brick, dry and dusty in the sun. Big, almost grand, except it looked like the leftovers of another three buildings cobbled together, giving it the overall feel of the lonely Friday night dinners Marceline used to make herself as a kid. There was an old car in the driveway, but judging by the way the tires were sunk into the mud it had been there for a long time. She pressed the button for the doorbell did not hear it ring, so rapped the bronze door-knocker three times. After five minutes of waiting, there was no reply.

‘Let’s just go. You didn’t have any problems peeing behind a bush last time,’ Bonnie grumbled. But Marceline tried the door handle and found the house was unlocked.

‘Two minutes. No one will ever know,’ She said, feeling a grin creep across her face.

‘No way. They might just be out on a walk or something,’ Bonnie said. Though the more and more they looked around, the more that seemed unlikely. The open front door revealed a mound of untouched letters on the other side, the grass was patchy and growing tall and wild the whole way out to the back fence. There was not a single light or a sound coming from the house. There was no sound or movement at all. No one was home, and no one was going to be home for quite some time.

Marceline went inside to use the toilet. All the water still ran, even if the electricity didn’t work.

The house was empty. There were old plant pots here and there, in the hallways and on tables, but the plants they held were withered and grey. The furniture was all uncovered and collecting dust and the books still filled their shelves, as if someone planned to come back any minute. The curtains weren’t even drawn. Every door was unlocked. The house smelt of nothing. Something was trying to eat away at Marceline’s guts, trying to tell her this was all wrong.

Whoever used to live there had a weird thing for corn, too. Framed on the walls were paintings and black-and-white photographs of ears of corn, on the side tables were corn statues, in bronze or porcelain or carved and varnished wood. All the plates in the kitchen were yellow, all the cups and mugs were green. An antique musket hung on the wall above the back door, a corn plant embossed in the metalwork.

They circled the whole house, picking their way through the nettles and weeds and wildflowers of the lawn. Marceline laughed when Bonnie tripped over an old football, deflated and dejected amongst the grasses. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ Bonnie said, though Marceline could see she was forcing back a smile.

At the back of the garden was a wooden farm gate leading onto a field of ripening corn. It was tall, strong and green, carefully cultivated. There was not another house or even a barn around for miles.

A path had been cut through the corn. ‘No,’ Bonnie said, reading Marceline’s mind. She hated it when she did that.

‘Why not?’ Marceline whined. She was already sitting on the gate, the sun glaring down and cooking her skull through her long, thick hair.

‘We shouldn’t be here. This is so wrong, Marceline,’ Bonnie said.

‘God, why do you always have to be so condensing?’

‘Condescending,’ Bonnie corrected her.

‘Is that not what I said?’

‘Look, let’s just go. This place is creeping me out more than my uncle at Christmas dinner.’

‘You’re still the same,’ Marceline grumbled, swinging her legs idly. ‘If you don’t want to come go and sit in the car. Lock the doors whilst you sit there, though. I won’t be long, only twenty minutes.’

Marceline through the keys a few feet short of Bonnie just to piss her off. Bonnie muttered something Marceline couldn’t hear and marched back off to the car with indignation, leaving Marceline as she hopped off the other side of the gate and entered the corn maze.

She was wondering why she’d said yes so easily to Bonnie joining her on the trip. She’d been wondering it all night as she slept soundly in the seat next to her. Maybe it was the big, pretty eyes that still threatened to make her melt, or the way she used her big clever brain to say big clever words to make Marceline’s head spin so fast she didn’t know which way was up or down. Bonnie frustrated her, and they argued like children with each other, but Marceline was having no second thoughts. It was like there was a little part of her body carved out for Bonnie so exactly that no one else would fit. Marceline had learnt to ignore the gaping hole she’d left there, but now they were together again she was beginning to wonder how she’d ever managed to live without her. 

The maze didn’t have any dead ends. It went out, and around, and turned back in on itself. Marceline assumed she was walking in one big wiggly spiral. She could have just run through the rows of corn, but it would have ruined the fun and, as far as she was concerned, the longer Bonnie had to wait for her, the better.

At the centre of the spiral was a small circle where the ground had been trampled down and nothing grew. In the centre of the circle was a bottle of milk. Marceline bent down to pick it up. It was cold, condensation had formed on the outside. Thirsty and beginning to break a sweat, she tore off the bottle cap, sniffed it to make sure it wasn’t rotten, and chugged half of it. It was smooth and chilled and satisfied her completely. She replaced the cap and set the bottle back down where she had found it. Then, aware Bonnie was waiting for her, she diligently retraced her steps back around the corn spiral.

When Marceline hopped back over the gate, she didn’t think anything was wrong. It wasn’t until she went up to the car to see that it had sunk into the mud and grown a thick layer of dust like the one they had found before, now beginning to rust all over. She wiped the dirt from the window to look inside to see it all their stuff had been taken out. The false panel in the trunk had not been meddled with. That meant Hank Handsome’s bass was still there. That was good. But nothing else seemed good at all. She was wondering if this was some elaborate prank Bonnie had set up to get back at her for calling her condensing. Or was it condescending? Whatever. Bonnie was always kind of cute when she got frustrated.

Marceline went back into the house to look for Bonnie. In the hallway was a bright, rambling monstera plant. She hadn’t noticed it when she came in last time. In the kitchen, too. There were sunflowers and tomato plants growing against sticks by the wobbly glass windows. All the corn memorabilia still cluttered the house. In the living room, Marceline was sure the couch had been facing the other way, and that there hadn’t been a pile of books on the ottoman, or an empty green mug on the coffee table.

‘Bonnie?’ Marceline called. The rotting feeling in her stomach was back. Maybe the milk was bad, after all. There was no reply, and she called again. Her voice did not echo.

There was a thundering of footsteps from upstairs. The footsteps raced down the stairs, and Marceline found herself embraced by a woman much older than her.

When Marceline was free, she looked into the woman’s eyes and saw that it was Bonnie. Her hair was in a long braid all the way down to her hips, the first few inches of it growing out grey. Her face was wrinkled and slightly sunken, her hands worn. Her glasses had been broken many times and fixed, Marceline could tell, and she was wearing clothes that she didn’t recognise. 

‘It’s been so long,’ Bonnie said, tears in her eyes. ‘You’ve been gone so long.’

‘Um,’ Marceline said. Bonnie was gripping her by the shoulders, making sure she was real.

‘Twenty minutes, you said,’ she laughed to herself sadly, ‘it’s been a lot longer than twenty minutes. I waited for you, even though I shouldn’t have. The seasons never changed. Oh, and neither have you. You’re still so beautiful and young.’

Old Bonnie wiped a calloused thumb over Marceline’s cheek.

The house was still silent, despite the plants, despite old Bonnie. Marceline looked out the window and saw that there was no wind out over the corn fields. The tall stalks stood there, perfectly still, untouched by time. No birds sang in the trees.

‘What happened?’ Marceline asked.

‘Absolutely nothing,’ Bonnie replied. ‘That’s the problem. It’s the corn, it’s whatever is inside there. I could never bear to go in. I know it would be wrong.’

The house’s structure was suddenly oppressive. It’s emptiness was unbearable. Marceline wanted nothing more than to run away. ‘I should go,’ she said. She should have never stopped here. She should have never pulled off the stupid highway.

‘No,’ old Bonnie said forcefully, no longer wistful and happy, but stern. ‘You can’t leave. You have to stay.’

‘That’s stupid, Bonnie. You’re so smart but you’re stupid at the same time,’ Marceline said. Bonnie grabbed her by the wrist and tugged Marceline to the ground. They grappled for a while, Bonnie trying to hold Marceline in place on the floor, but she slammed old Bonnie in the stomach with a ‘sorry!’ and pushed herself free. Bonnie screamed a noise Marceline did not know she was capable of. A scream of grief, of anger, of desperation. That must have been some bad milk. Badder than a crocodile on steroids that just loved the smell of sunscreen.

‘I’m sorry!’ Bonnie wailed. Marceline sprinted out the front door to circle back towards the corn field. Its eerie stillness struck fear deep into her heart, made her stomach wither away, but she leapt back over the gate safe in the knowledge old Bonnie wouldn’t follow her. Even wading through the dense walls of stalks and leaves, tripping on stones and getting whacked in the face by ears of unripe corn, she could hear Bonnie’s shriek.

The spotless blue sky clouded over very suddenly and it began to piss it down with rain. It mixed with the dust that lay on everything and turned it all to slimy mud. By the time she had reached the centre of the maze, Marceline was soaked through like a pancake at the bottom of the pile.

Panting, her shoes ruined, she stared at the milk bottle in its lifeless circle. An instinct from inside her bones told her to pick it up and smash it against the ground. On impact, in harmony with the sound of shattering glass, a lightning bolt struck the house, followed almost immediately by a clap of thunder. After that there was no sound except the rain and the leaves of the corn as the breeze brushed them together. Marceline could no longer hear Bonnie scream.

She left the broken glass all over the ground and ran back through the corn. She did not look back. The Chevrolet was there, waiting. Young Bonnie was glaring at her in the rear view mirror.

Marceline heaved the door open and threw herself inside.

‘That’s what you get,’ Bonnie muttered.

‘I’m sorry,’ Marceline panted, collapsing over the wheel. ‘I’m sorry. You were right. We shouldn’t have stopped here.’

‘You should know by now that I’m always right,’ Bonnie said. Marceline looked at her, her smooth youthful skin, her bright eyes, the lustre to her hair. Suddenly she felt something stir in between her ribs, an old feeling she thought was resigned only to memories and old pictures of them both.

‘What are you looking at?’ Bonnie said, breaking Marceline’s trance. ‘Let’s get out of here. This place is creeping me the hell out.’

‘Yeah,’ Marceline said, turning the keys in the ignition. ‘Me too.’

At least now she knew Bonnie would make a hot milf.


	3. Fireworks, Ferris Wheels, and Lycanthropy

Two days later, they stopped in a small town about two-hundred miles out of the next city. The ground was dustier and drier, the greens of the landscape where slowly turning to yellow ochres and the yellows were turning to greys and browns. The desert was inching ever closer. They had been taking turns driving, bickering with each other, stopping briefly in towns to get lunch or dinner and maybe buy a CD they could agree on, and, when Marceline wasn’t asking for a fight, gossiping to each other about people they used to go to school with. When they were in towns they could usually find a hotel or a gym to wash in, and if not Bonnie discovered Marceline was satisfied by stripping naked and swimming in opaque river water. Bonnie refused to join her.

Marceline was increasingly frustrated by Bonnie’s slow, careful driving as she made manufactured circles around every block, looking for somewhere they could stop and maybe even a hotel room they could stay in. It had only been three nights and Bonnie was already desperate for a real bed.

‘Oh, look at that! That’s tonight! How convenient,’ Bonnie said, pointing at the hand-painted sign on the roadside that had been tied up to a chain link fence.

‘Midsummer firework fair? I don’t know Bonnie, haven’t you seen _The Wicker Man_?’ Marceline replied.

‘That’s about May Day festival. You can’t use some old scary movie as an excuse not to have any fun, Marceline,’ Bonnie scolded her, encouraging Marceline’s eye-roll. They were falling back into their old habits together already.

‘You know what, I guess we could do with a break for half a day,’ Marceline sighed, ‘we’ve come pretty far anyway.’

They left the on a dusty dead-end track by the sign that announced the town’s border over the outline of a horseshoe. Across the road was another, a piece of junk wood on a stick, reminding them that it was a full moon that night.

After wondering around town they settled on a sad looking restaurant in the square facing a white-washed church. They sat outside, it was a nice evening, and there were countless pictures of horses covering the walls inside with their big, beady eyes, and Bonnie didn’t feel like being watched whilst she ate. Marceline ordered a veggie burger and the cheapest beer on the menu. Bonnie got pasta and an iced tea. They ate their plastic, half-warm food in silence, the sounds of a slow, lazy evening trickling all around them as people milled through the square and kids rushed past on their bicycles.

By the time they walked to the fair the sun was setting and turning the sky’s soft blue to baby pink at its edges. Bonnie had the strange desire to reach out and to take Marceline’s hand. She stifled it. They were quiet and Marceline was calm. It was like she floated unaware into Bonnie’s dream and became the central character. Bonnie turned away, facing ahead down the empty road and to the flood channels on the curb side. No. There was no use dreaming about Marceline. Not anymore.

Their peace was disrupted when a very nervous, very sweaty teenager, a good few years younger than the two of them, galloped across the road.

‘Excuse me, you don’t happen to have any ketamine, do you?’ they asked with a forced politeness. They were very flustered—panicked, even—and looked a lot like they were in a hurry. Bonnie noticed their prominent front teeth jutting out from under their top lip.

‘No, sorry,’ Marceline said calmly.

‘Are you sure? I’ve got money, I can pay, please,’ they pleaded. Their eyes turned to Bonnie, beady and blank and following her like an animal’s. Bonnie shook her head.

‘Sorry,’ she said, dismissing them. She and Marceline kept on walking, and the teenager sulked away to a group of equally frantic-looking friends. ‘What’s all that about?’

‘They’re just dumb kids,’ Marceline said, glancing over her shoulder at the small herd of them that had gathered on the corner of the block. ‘Probably better not to think about it.’

‘Should we tell someone?’

‘Hell, no. I’m not a cop,’ Marceline laughed. Bonnie put it out of her mind.

The fair was small and dense, taking up a disused field that had been recently mowed so that little piles of dried grass were left everywhere. It was busy enough to make Bonnie think that almost everyone in town had arrived. Families, grandparents with children, couples pushing prams around, teenagers passing around plastic cups with mystery contents. Arranged in wobbly rows were stalls selling local orange juice and jams and cheese, olives and pickles and hand-made purses, but the two of them went straight for the fairground. Bonnie beat Marceline multiple times at the stall with the air-rifle game, though was beaten to a prize by a talented five-year-old and Marceline didn’t let her forget it. There was a Waltzer that Marceline went on again and again, bumper-cars where they paid for a car each and viciously targeted each other for the full two minutes, so much cotton candy Bonnie was almost sick, and a Ferris wheel loaded with teenagers making out they decided not to touch. Bonnie thought: they had been those teenagers once, kissing shamelessly in public, pulling at each other’s hair. She wondered if Marceline was thinking about it too, or if she was too caught up in trying to win a stuffed tiger too big to even fit in the car at the stall with the basketball game. For someone who had been so reluctant to go, Marceline looked like she was having a lot of fun.

‘Come on,’ she said to Bonnie, bouncing up and down and grinning, ‘let’s do the Waltzer again before they do the fireworks.’

‘You can if you want to. I don’t think I could stomach any more spinning,’ Bonnie said, pained even by the sight of the constant rotation of the Ferris wheel with its pink and white lights.

‘Alright, but wait here. I left my phone in the car and I’ll never find you otherwise,’ Marceline said. She turned around and ran away, coins jingling in her pocket, leaving Bonnie alone in the edges of the dim light the festival let onto the field. The sun had gone down and the moon, huge, round and white, was rising over the distant horizon.

As soon as Marceline disappeared from view Bonnie heard a cry from further out into the darkness of the field. She couldn’t make out of it was a child or an adult, an animal or a person. When it came again she took out the torch on her phone and ducked under the tape that had been wound around metal stakes to keep people off the fireworks, and left behind the humming of the fair.

The first two cries were met by another, distorted and pained. ‘Hello?’ Bonnie called. Into the small ring of light staggered the teenager from earlier, their eyes filled up with black, hair sprouting all over their face and their bare arms.

‘ _Please_ ,’ they begged her. ‘ _Please,_ do you have any ket?’

They fell forwards onto their knees then pulled themselves towards Bonnie, grabbing at her ankles.

‘Nuh-uh This is way wrong,’ Bonnie said, helping the teenager to their feet. She knew she should have done something earlier. Typical Marceline, too self-involved by whatever angst she was harbouring to help anyone else. They were unexpectedly heavy, their body wide and solid with muscle in all the wrong places. Their head was hung, in shame or in exhaustion Bonnie couldn’t tell. And was it her, or were they growing? ‘Hey,’ she said, ‘are you awake? Can you even hear me?’

Bonnie found herself thrown to the ground. There was the tearing of fabric, the breaking of bones and the ripping of flesh, and one final cry of agony. Her phone fell into the grass—her light was gone. She could hardly see the big, wide horse’s nose that reached towards her face, breathing hot, damp air into it. Even from the ground, Bonnie sensed its bloodthirsty rage.

She scrambled backwards, grabbing her phone. Now there wasn’t just the one horse, there were three. They circled her like sharks in a cartoon, sizing her up, baiting each other to make the first attack. Bonnie’s breath stilled in her throat, her heart pounding.

The first horse broke the circle. It stood over her, its silhouette cast down by the light of the full moon, and its jaw unhinged like that of a snake to reveal row upon row of razor sharp teeth. Bonnie almost pissed herself. She thought, in that instant, she was going to die a painful, horrible death.

From further into the field came a whistle. It cut through the silence of her terror, a bright spark rising upwards to explode in the night sky like a distress signal. The horses whined and reeled back, stampeding away. Thawed out from fear, Bonnie stood up and ran back towards the tape to find Marceline.

Marceline’s smile disappeared instantly. She asked: ‘What’s wrong?’ Bonnie realised there were tears across her cheeks.

There was no way Bonnie could describe what had happened without sounding completely fucking insane. ‘Bonnie, did something happen?’ Marceline asked when Bonnie couldn’t get the words out. The fireworks rattled off behind them, one after another, throwing colours wildly across Marceline’s face. The concern in her voice was tangible and sharp. At the very least, Bonnie thought, the pressure of that intense, dedicated gaze was familiar. And extremely comforting. 

‘I need a hug,’ Bonnie muttered. Marceline wrapped her up in her arms right as the screamers started firing, shooting white light up from the ground and fizzling out over their heads. After that there were five huge rockets that soared up to be taken adrift by the wind. The last explosion rang out over the new quiet of the festival. People began to return to the stalls and the rides and their bags of cotton candy.

Bonnie heard a noise and flinched. Her feet couldn’t move. Again Marceline asked: ‘What’s wrong?’ But she’d heard it, too. The distant galloping. Getting nearer. They turned to face the field, to see fifty twisted, absolutely shredded horses racing at full pelt towards them, their mouths opened to reveal their horrendous sets of teeth.

‘What the fuck?’ Marceline yelled. Hysteria erupted over the festival crowd. The horses with their hellish mouths were upon them, leaping over the taped boundary or just charging through it, huge, heavy hooves stomping across the dry earth.

Bonnie and Marceline gripped each other by the arm and ran.

‘In here!’ Bonnie yelled, spotting an abandoned food truck, and leaping over the countertop to climb inside. Marceline followed her. She was halfway over the ledge when one of the horses seized her leg in between its teeth and she let out a wail of pain. Bonnie held onto her arms. Marceline kicked the horse off her with her free foot, falling forwards on top of Bonnie. The horse, its head and neck too wide to fit through the opening, frustratedly shook the truck several times and moved on. Cowering by a refrigerator, Bonnie and Marceline were clinging together like two of those weird little flat pieces of Lego that are impossible to pull apart.

‘Your foot,’ Bonnie whispered. Marceline winced as she poked at the dents the horse had made. It was bleeding a little, but the opened cuts were already going black and blue. The pieces were falling together in Bonnie’s mind. She had read enough old mythology and seen enough of the transformation from human to horse to know more or less what was going on. ‘It got you.’

‘What’s happening?’

‘They’re lycanthropes,’ Bonnie muttered. ‘Or hipanthropes? Considering the term lycanthropy applies to wolves…’

‘I can’t say I’m that bothered about etymology right now,’ Marceline gasped against grated teeth. She was right—they didn’t have much time. Bonnie could see her eyes were already glazing over.

‘It got you. You’re becoming one of them,’ she said, reaching out to touch Marceline’s cheek. It was not often she had seen her so scared.

‘I’m not a horse girl, I can’t turn into one of them, Bonnie, please don’t let me become one of them. I’ll do anything. I’ll start flossing my teeth. I’ll stop prank-calling radio shows. I’ll stop dodging my taxes. Please, Bon, I can’t turn into that.’ She put her forehead against Bonnie’s shoulder. Bonnie took a deep breath.

‘Ketamine,’ Bonnie said.

‘You can’t do ketamine now, you have to use your big brain to help me,’ Marceline said.

‘No, that kid wanted ketamine. And then I saw them transform. It must hinder the transformation or something.’

‘Where the fuck are you going to find ketamine?’

Prizing herself free of Marceline, Bonnie stood up to search the food truck. Someone must have been trying to prepare for their situation—either that or all the teens in this town loved methamphetamines. She had the ketone and a solvent with a high enough boiling point she needed for the thermal rearrangement reaction. All she needed now was a lot of heat. It would take hours, and she didn’t know if Marceline had hours, but it would have to do. If she could get it all done before sunrise, Marceline might be cured of it forever. She’d never been more thankful to have taken that pharmacology module.

‘Oh my God, don’t look at me,’ Marceline said, prompting Bonnie to look at her. Marceline was looking at her reflection in the greasy metal cooker that someone had been flipping burgers on. ‘My teeth are sticking out. I’m going to need braces again. For fuck's sake.’

Bonnie peeked over the food truck’s counter, regretfully sticking her hand in a pile of old watery mustard. There weren’t any were-horses around.

‘Come on,’ Bonnie said, wiping her mustard-fingers on Marceline’s jacket when she wasn’t looking. ‘I have a plan.’

Marceline barely remembered anything from the night before. She woke up in a storm drain under a beating sun. Her brain was foggy and she had a nasty headache. Her nose hurt—when she touched it she could see it had been bleeding—and there was a vile taste at the back of her throat that reminded her vaguely of a few equally immemorable nights spent at clubs and bars in her first year as a student. She was filthy, smelling like sweat and hay and manure and chemicals and sick, so when her aching limbs could manage it she hauled herself to her feet and climbed out of the big concrete ditch she had slept in. Bonnie was nowhere to be seen.

Her clothes were all torn up. She had no idea why. The sleeves had been torn off her shirt and it hung loos around her. Her jeans had lost the zip and the button, the patches had split off the knees again, and there was a hole from what looked like the bite mark of a bear at the bottom of one leg, though there was no wound whatsoever underneath. She didn’t have any shoes or socks. Other than the terrible smell that had attached to her, her body was miraculously unscathed.

Her head was murky and grey like a shitty day in winter. She looked around from the top of the ditch to see the back of the town, the apartment blocks with laundry on their balconies peter out into smaller blocks of squat houses with curved rooftiles and wastelands beyond them instead of shiny tarmac roads and patios. Coming towards her was the road they had driven in on, the sign that welcomed them there, and just behind it was the Chevrolet. She walked over to it, careful not to step on snakes or broken glass in her bare feet, and saw that Bonnie was not there. She’d left the driver’s window open, which was stupid of her considering all of her stuff and Hank Handsome’s bass were locked in that car, though now proved incredibly useful as she reached in to unlock it. She bundled up a bunch of clean clothes and walked to the canal she and Bonnie had passed yesterday to wash the worst of the stink off her.

Despite the oppressive heat of the sun that morning, Marceline felt warm blood rush to her face when she reached the canal. There was Bonnie, swimming naked in the semi-clear water, hair tied up in a loose bun to keep it dry, her skin glowing in the light like she was from heaven. Her clothes were folded neatly and piled up on the concrete wall. Marceline wanted to turn around and become invisible but a gasp of shock had escaped her against her will and Bonnie, ever perceptive, had noticed her.

There was a moment of indescribable tension as each tried, and failed, to read the other’s mind. Marceline broke it first.

‘So you _will_ swim in the river! You just didn’t want to swim with me!’ she barked, her throat a bit sore. Her teeth ached, too. Shit, she didn’t want to have to get braces again. Without warning she tore off her ripped up vest and the jeans that had lost the button and the zip and jumped in next to Bonnie, getting her hair wet. ‘I woke up in a storm drain.’

‘Yeah, you were pretty insistent to sleep there last night,’ Bonnie said casually. Too casually for Bonnie. They treaded water, faces barely two inches apart, Marceline dead set on not looking down. ‘Don’t you remember? We had a fight and you didn’t want to sleep in the car with me.’

‘What happened to my clothes?’

‘We were walking back from the Midsummer festival through that lemon field and your jeans kept catching on all the thorns. You also stuck your arms in someone’s pot of chili at the fair last night so you just tore them off instead of washing them. You’re so gross,’ Bonnie said, splashing Marceline in the face.

‘Shit, I don’t remember that at all,’ Marceline mumbled. She was wracking her brain, but the only thing there was some weird dream… something about horse tranquilisers and a girl with a pretty face teasing her about some old memory she thought she’d locked up.

‘Yeah you were pretty drunk. You had that beer at the restaurant and you just kept going. I tried to stop you.’

‘You’re not my Mum.’

‘That’s exactly what you said last night.’

‘That shouldn’t sound like sex joke.’

‘It’s not a sex joke.’

‘Sounds like one.’

For a second, Marceline was certain Bonnie had glanced down at her lips and couldn’t hold back a smirk. Apparently sick of her shit all of a sudden, Bonnie swam away. She climbed out, asking politely that Marceline didn’t look because she’s so ‘immature and gross.’ But when she said it there was laughter in her throat. God, Marceline thought, how she’d missed Bonnie Butlers.

‘I had the weirdest dream last night,’ Marceline said, floating on her back and talking to the sky, ‘I think you were there.’

‘Uh-huh,’ Bonnie replied.

‘Want to hear about it?’

‘If I say no will you tell me anyway?’

‘So we were at the festival, and there were fireworks, and these crazy-nasty werewolf horses with shit tons of teeth, and you were there, and we were running away and one got me, and I begged you like, _“oh, no! it got me! I’m going to die!”_ then you found a load of chemicals and this huge vat from one of the stalls and you hooked up to this huge generator that had been for the bumper cars and to heat the chemicals up in the vat like some post-apocalypse science-witch-sorcerer. Then I turned into one of the werewolf horses and it was really gross but you climbed to the top of the Ferris wheel with one of those air rifles and all the drugs you’d made in, in that, you know, in the vat, and got them to shoot these little pellets of drugs at all the horse monsters and they all turned back into loser teenagers. Except for me, who turned back into regular sexy and awesome Marceline, of course. It was pretty fucking badass.’

‘You’re right,’ Bonnie called back from the top of the canal. ‘That does sound pretty badass of me.’

‘If only you were that cool in real life, huh?’

‘Yeah,’ Bonnie laughed the same bright, sonorous laugh that Marceline had fallen in love with, ‘if only.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> two chapters in one week because why not. yes i researched how to cook ket for this


	4. Engine Problems, Aliens, and Definitely Not Getting Jealous

Bonnie made sure Marceline, anxious as she was to be on the move again after the Midsummer festival, didn’t drive them into the desert unprepared. She bought plenty of water, some emergency fuel in a plastic container, sunglasses, and some eggs and bacon they could probably cook in tin foil over the heat of the engine. She even bought a basic repair kit—spanners and screwdrivers, that kind of thing—and was going to check for the spare tyre in the trunk when she came across a padlocked compartment.

‘What’s this for?’

‘Oh. Oh! Um,’ Marceline said. Bonnie knew Marceline too well to buy into her shitty fake surprise. The panel was huge. Not even Marceline The Brick Wall could have missed it. Bonnie knew how much she loved the Chevrolet. ‘I don’t know. It’s, um, my Dad’s. You know the car used to be my Dad’s for a little while. He told me not to look in there.’

‘Really?’ Bonnie asked, completely unimpressed. Marceline nodded, and slapped the car.

‘Really. Let’s go. Are we ready? Let’s go. I’d love to go.’

They went. Bonnie resolved to find out another time. Maybe when Marceline wasn’t watching.

They took turns driving all night long.

Driving through the desert felt like one of Bonnie’s recurring dreams—running down a hallway with her goal constantly moving further and further away, her legs stuck pushing and pulling through thick syrup. Time expanded over and beyond the big flat horizon. There was dark blue in the pit of the sky, light blue around the edges, and white and brown wasteland as far as the eye could see, the single line of the road running through it. Marceline kept the pedal floored and the windows down, screaming with delight over the rush of wind as the car hit its top speed, though they still moved apparently nowhere. The only other living things to hear the roar of the engine were maybe a few snakes and the truck drivers that Marceline loved to pass at the worst times just, Bonnie was sure, to irritate her—though in Bonnie’s opinion the ridiculous stories about Marceline’s friends trying to get a lobotomy at Claire’s with a fake ID were worse. At some point they saw two pickup trucks parked on the side of the road, surrounded by dodgy homemade gear and a few men sunburnt to a deep crimson. Either looking for aliens or there to watch the meteor shower forecast for the next few days. They managed to have an argument about it. Marceline said aliens, Bonnie said meteors.

After an eternity of dust and sand and emptiness they entered the domain of some rocky brown foothills. It was then that black smoke started to pour out from under the bonnet of the car.

‘Oh fuck,’ Marceline said. To Bonnie’s disappointment, she didn’t stop the car but instead leaned out of her window in order to see around the smoke. ‘It’s all those eggs you fried over the engine.’

‘You were pushing the engine too hard.’

‘Sexy people drive fast.’ Bonnie just rolled her eyes and gave up.

The smoke was accompanied by a chorus of sickly chortling noises. Marceline let them roll to a stop in the middle of the road.

‘Why did you stop here?’ Bonnie asked, her patience thinning out.

‘I didn’t. We just stopped,’ Marceline said casually. Oh no, oh God, Bonnie thought, we’ll be stuck out here to die and some creep will kidnap us when he’s pretending to fix the car then cut us up into pieces and ship us back home one by one like the most horrific TV serial you’ve ever seen. Unfortunately Marceline’s complete calm made her anxieties ten times worse. Bonnie watched her out of the car in her wide-brimmed straw hat and her sunglasses to look under the hood. After a quick glance and a lot of bad noises, she slammed it shut again and said: ‘Let’s push it clear of the road.’

Bonnie opened the passenger door and turned around to look at Grandad Chad tied securely onto the back seat. She wondered if she’d ever get to Butterscotch Bay alive.

Marceline kept forgetting she had to go to Butterscotch Bay. Bonnie’s comment about the map or the lack thereof, it had completely slipped her mind. It was only slightly demoralising to think that, for Bonnie, she was just a means to an ends. And she’d come a bit too close to Hank Handsome’s bass for Marceline’s liking, and probably hadn’t bought her half-hearted excuse. She had always thought she was a good liar until she met Bonnie. She was like some omniscient God. Though it had been kind of hot at first, it of course got old. 

After another argument about the car, they went for a walk. Bonnie stormed off ahead of Marceline, furious with her. She had been completely preoccupied with how to fix the car, which neither of them were capable of. Marceline knew that Bonnie got too involved and set her expectations like a blind dog betting their favourite bone on a horse race, which made the fall to reality a big one, so she had suggested that they take a break from worrying about it and go for a walk. If she knew Bonnie at all, she knew that by the time she had calmed down and cleared her head she be able to see a solution straight away with her huge brain.

So there they were.

She just hoped that King and The Missed Takes weren’t scouring the desert looking for them. They might just be crazy enough to follow them out so far. Even so the stress of their pursuit was falling away like a sand timer running out. Marceline was managing to have fun.

She watched Bonnie go ahead up the rocky foothills and thought how strange it was that they were here, and that they were together. All the days and nights they’d spent together and all the ones they’d spent ripped apart had landed them here, at the top of a hill, overlooking a deep trench and a tall, silver monolith.

‘The fuck,’ Marceline muttered, peering over her sunglasses. It was really there, she was sure from squinting, and made perfect reflections of everything around it to cast sharp bright rectangles of sunlight back. Even from the top of the ridge, she could clearly see the little figures of their reflections, side by side against the sky. 

‘It’s probably just some weird art project. Pretty cool though,’ Bonnie said, starting down into the trench. It was the first thing she’d said to her since they’d stopped arguing, and with it Marceline felt the pressure of the world fall off her shoulders. They were back to normal again; the cycle began anew. ‘It’s not even dusty.’

Marceline pressed her hand against the unyielding metal, then took shelter in the shade of a rock as Bonnie inspected the monolith. She barely even knew she was staring at her until a lizard crawled over her wrist and snapped her out of her daydream. It was when Marceline was idly thinking about the shorts Bonnie was wearing and the freckles across her bare shoulder when Bonnie reached out to touch the surface of the monolith.

There was a lot of hissing. Marceline thought she had stepped on a snake or a maybe broken set of bagpipes, but the sound was coming from the monolith. It changed colour, the silver reflection flashed black to white to purple and pink and green and then to silver again, and an elliptical panel lifted out from its surface. From behind the curved edge pumped plumes of cool gas that trembled across the floor and disguised the sand. Blinding light emanated from behind the elliptical door; Marceline could no longer able to see Bonnie standing there in blank wonder.

Out from the monolith floated a red blob of indescribable shape. It was barely three dimensional. The monolith omitted a low and faintly ominous noise, a noise that made Marceline want to collapse on her own heart like a black hole, one that reminded her both of the infinity of space and the primordial soup of her mother’s womb. Eventually, as the blob loitered there in the air, it began to take the shape of something solid, vaguely recognisable. And then, once it had formed a mouth and a throat to speak with, it said: ‘Hello. Don’t be alarmed.’

Marceline was finding that difficult. Especially as the red blob’s shape solidified more—limbs, bone structure, the stringent fibres of muscles—it sculpted itself not only a pair of enormous anime-wife sized tits, but a massive dick as well. At least ten inches long. At first marvelling at something that could only have been a hallucination, Marceline felt herself obliged to look away.

‘I descended here from the satellite of a distant star. I have observed organisms on this cosmic body for eons. My vessel would open only to contact with a being of adequate intelligence. You are the first of all life here to have excelled past my parameters,’ said the blob, no longer a blob but a body their mimicked their own, sort of. Marceline wondered if Bonnie had slipped something in her water bottle, or if she was really seeing the ancient-big-titty-dump-truck-ass-alien stepping telling her ex-girlfriend she was the most incredible person they’d ever met. That, Marceline caught herself thinking, is my job. ‘I have taken this form to appeal to your kind. Is something wrong?’

‘Yeah, um,’ Bonnie stumbled.

‘Can you maybe get rid of, uh, this?’ Marceline said, waving at her own crotch. Bonnie nodded in agreement, and the alien ken-dolled itself. Marceline wasn’t sure if that was better or worse.

‘Anything else?’

They were both looking at the alien’s unrealistically large boobs. ‘No,’ they said in tandem. Then, Bonnie said: ‘What should we call you?’

‘Call me Mike,’ said Mike.

‘I have so many questions,’ Bonnie began. Behind Mike, the monolith had sealed itself back up. Mike stood in front of them, slightly too large, their proportions very marginally incorrect, like an art student’s mediocre life class drawing. Or maybe, Marceline thought, it was the just tits.

‘And I for you,’ Mike said. Their voice was like a hammer struck against cold steel. Marceline didn’t trust them at all. Mike only looked at Bonnie, and Bonnie only looked at Mike. They were consumed by each other. It took Marceline a minute to get Bonnie’s attention.

‘Can we go back to the car? We should eat before it gets dark,’ Marceline said.

‘Oh,’ Bonnie replied, completely disinterested. ‘Yes. Fine.’

Marceline led the way back to the car back up the ridge and through the rocky hills. Bonnie and Mike followed behind her. Mike didn’t walk quite right, like they had only seen basketball players with bones made of elastic in action movies walk before and just thought that was how everyone did it. Even so, Bonnie was completely obsessed with them. She’d tripped over multiple times, lost in Mike’s flat, red eyes (they were the same colour all over), only for Mike to catch her in their arms. Marceline was pretty sure she had started doing it on purpose by the fourth time. And she recognised that excited little giggle she did because Marceline used to be able to make Bonnie giggle like that. Now it was the giggle she was doing for Mike. Mike the alien.

The sun was beginning to set over the wasteland. The browns and yellows were turning to lifeless grey as the light drained away from this side of the Earth, the teeth of the rocks cutting black silhouettes against the fading blue of the sky. Bonnie was busy talking about ‘Hegelian syncopation’ or something with Mike, _fucking big-titty Mike,_ Marceline thought. Whatever. She could build a fire herself.

She wandered around the car, gathering bits of dried grass and withered twigs to use as tinder and set them up in a circle of stones. For five minutes she cursed at her lighter until it finally produced a small flame. She found some larger pieces of wood before it was too dark, half-certain she would return to find Mike’s fat red tongue down Bonnie’s throat. She didn’t, but the way Bonnie was talking about the development of Indo-European language families made Marceline think that they may as well be.

‘Do you want anything to eat?’ she asked Bonnie.

Bonnie didn’t even look in her direction when she said: ‘No, thanks.’

‘Eat?’ Mike said.

And off they went on another discussion. She felt like she was being punched repeatedly in the stomach by someone who was very aware that she had a hernia. It was a sickening green kind of feeling. She sat cross-legged at the wavering yellow light of the campfire next to a packet of saltines, tuning the travel guitar she had uncovered from the trunk of the car.

She had barely strummed two chords when Mike snapped, still not acknowledging her: ‘What is that infernal noise?’

‘It’s music,’ Marceline said. ‘Do you not have music where you’re from?’

‘Marceline, don’t be so patronising,’ Bonnie scolded. Marceline jumped to her feet.

‘Sorry, _you’re_ calling _me_ , patronising?’ she scoffed. ‘Go get Mike to suck your dick where I don’t have to listen.’

‘ _Marceline_ , don’t be such a child. What’s wrong with you today? You’re embarrassing me,’ Bonnie whispered, like Mike the all-knowing alien who’d been watching the Earth since before their cave ancestors were born couldn’t hear her. Marceline kicked dust over the fire and went to get in the car, listening to Bonnie go, ‘I’m so sorry about her.’

 _You’re embarrassing me._ Even with the doors shut she could hear Mike and Bonnie going on and on and on. She dug out an old Mendelssohn CD from the glove box and played it loud enough to block out their voices. She fell asleep and dreamt of a world where her ex-girlfriend wasn’t obsessed with some creepy alien with fat mommy-milkers they found inside a big block of metal and where she didn’t embarrass her.

If Marceline had looked up at the stars that night, she would have seen a shower meteorites burning their paths between them as they hurtled towards the Earth.

Bonnie was completely enraptured by Mike. How couldn’t she be? There was not enough time in a lifetime to answer all the questions she had. But at least she had won the rare opportunity to meet them. Speaking with them was effortless, listening was even easier, knowledge passed between them like when she and Marceline used to share cigarettes when they were teenagers.

_Marceline._ Sulking Marceline. Was she jealous? No, that was impossible. She just didn’t like Mike for whatever abstract reason Marceline had made up this time. Bonnie didn’t expect her to understand. She and Marceline ultimately operated on different wavelengths and therefore cared about different things. Fortunately for Bonnie, her and Mike had connected instantly. Having had the last week, almost, completely saturated with Marceline, Marceline, Marceline to the extent she was seeing her in her dreams; Mike was a breath of fresh air on the desert’s endless fart. 

They stayed up talking all night. Bonnie barely felt the time slip by. She barely felt the tiredness take her mind away. It would be one of those memories that she knew she would never forget. Right next to building a thermo-nuclear reactor when she was twelve, breeding invisible rats that went on to get PhDs, or kissing Marceline for the first time when she was nervous and sixteen. The memory came to her on the spot; the way she had felt her blood run hot all the way through her, how every movement Marceline made that drew them closer made her dizzy, how she knew in that instant that she was about to fall hopelessly in love with her best friend. Bonnie glanced at the car, a cold metal husk, music emanating faintly from it, knowing Marceline was inside. How it had come to this, broken and strange and held together awkwardly by glue, she had no idea.

When the morning came at last, the sun dazzling and hot, she realised she was hungry and finished Marceline’s saltines. Marceline woke up an hour or so later, grumbled miserably about something. Bonnie went behind a rock to pee and get changed, and when she returned, Mike was towering over Marceline, bigger and scarier than Bonnie had seen them all night, their tits pressing into Marceline’s face, though, impressively, her gaze didn’t falter. Dust got kicked up by the wind into little spirals around them.

‘Marceline,’ Bonnie sighed.

‘I don’t trust them, Bonnie. Why are they here? What do they want with us? With you? I’ve got a bad feeling in my tum. You know what I think about the feelings I get in my tum,’ she said, stepping out of Mike’s cleavage. ‘No, you know what, I know you don’t agree with me. Fine. I’m going on a walk. I’ll see you later.’

Bonnie didn’t call after Marceline. She didn’t want too. She was mad at her, again. Still, it was not without difficult Bonnie made herself look away so she didn’t have to watch Marceline disappear.

Mike didn’t say anything about it. They had barely even looked at Marceline, Bonnie realised. They started talking about what the centre of the universe smells like, and Bonnie set to work on the Chevrolet’s engine.

‘I must set out on a brief excursion,’ Mike said. Their face and voice were unreadable, completely devoid of human emotions. Maybe those would come with time, Bonnie thought, having been faced with more social situations and a wider range of cues and their implicit meanings. Or maybe Mike already understood all language, both verbal and physical, and had opted not to adopt all aspects of them. She wondered if Mike knew how to swear. Bonnie would never run out of questions.

‘Okay,’ she said.

‘I will be back,’ Mike said, and left in the same direction they had gone the day before to find the monolith.

Within ten minutes of sweating over the Chevrolet with the hood up, she’d found the problem that had seemed so unsolvable the day before and fixed it so that the engine ran smoothly.

The time passed by a lot slower with nothing to do and left out on her own. Marceline looked out at the hills where both Marceline and Mike had vanished. The sun was hot, and inside the car was like an oven. Loneliness kicked in. The view right out to the horizon. Nothing and nothing and nothing. Suddenly alarm bells were ringing in her head. Without a second thought for once, she got in the car and drove across the shrivelled-up wasteland to the next set of dusty foothills where Mike had disappeared.

She stopped the car as close as she could. Barely thinking about it, she grabbed the wrench that she had used to fix the engine and shoved it in the back pocket of her shorts. God, which way had they walked? Bonnie hadn’t paid attention. She had been too angry with Marceline for not caring about the car. There—footprints in the dirt—the treads of Marceline’s chunky combat boots. Up the slope: disturbed dust, little collections of fallen stones. Marceline had come this way.

She followed Marceline’s trail back to the monolith, that was open once more. It’s sides were dented and it was pouring more cold gas across the floor of the trench. Neither Mike nor Marceline were anywhere to be seen.

‘Marceline!’ Bonnie called. Her voice didn’t even echo. The only reply she got was the faint sound of crumbling stone. She crossed the trench and scaled the other slope, looking down into the next one where, on a flat orange stone like a table, Marceline lay unconscious, her arms laid down at her sides, her legs laid out straight. Her eyes were open, staring into the oblivion of the sky. Bonnie gasped.

Next to the stone table was Mike. Mike had shiny metallic tools in hand, the same sheen as the monolith. ‘Oh, you found me,’ they were not at all concerned by Bonnie’s presence. ‘Do you want to join in? Your companion would make an excellent specimen for my studies.’

Bonnie scrambled down the slope towards them. She reached out to hold Marceline’s face. She was still warm—she checked her pulse—and alive.

‘You can’t kill her,’ Bonnie said.

‘I don’t understand what you mean. I can kill her, it would be a very easy thing for me to do,’ Mike said.

‘But you shouldn’t. I don’t want you to,’ Bonnie replied. Mike tilted their head to one side, Bonnie moving herself between them and Marceline.

‘Even so. I didn’t plan to kill her, even though I found her attempting to tamper with my vessel. She is clearly of some strange use to you I do not yet understand. I only wish to lobotomise her. Take a small sample of the brain tissue from the frontal lobe,’ Mike said, reaching to put one big, bony red hand across Marceline’s face. They had drawn on it over her forehead and her eyelid. Targets. Bonnie slapped it away. ‘Oh,’ Mike said, ‘so you aren’t different from the others.’

‘What?’ Bonnie asked. Her fingers rested on the spanner in her back pocket. Could she even hit Mike? Would it be a fair fight at all?

‘I have attended my station on this primitive satellite covered in vermin and reprobates for longer than your mind is capable of comprehending. My vessel must have weakened to allow you to release me from my long dormancy. There is no point to life on this planet. Yours or hers or anyone’s. It is all insignificant,’ Mike explained. They took a heavy step towards Bonnie, boobs wobbling as they did so. Bonnie stepped back.

‘I can’t believe I trusted you. I can’t believe I was stupid enough to think we were equals,’ Bonnie spat.

‘Of course we are not equals. I am like a God to your kind. I was here when you were all created, I will be here when you have all died,’ Mike said.

‘Not if I can help it,’ she yelled.

She tossed the wrench at Mike.

It passed right through their body and clattered against the ground. ‘Fuck,’ she whispered.

Mike strode towards her. They grew taller, their ginormous milkers expanded, their arms and hands reached out towards Bonnie. ‘I will take you back to the mother rock and immortalise you in the stars of our celestial empire, human. Do not evade me. Hope is a silly human illusion. The universe is hope-less.’

Bonnie could not run away. She shot a glanced over her shoulder to see Marceline on the stone table, shaking herself awake. ‘Marceline!’ Bonnie yelled. Marceline grimaced at the sun.

Mike reached down and scooped Bonnie off her feet in their enormous palm. Bonnie kicked and writhed but it was futile. Mike squeezed her so she could hardly breathe and all the energy got sapped from her body.

Bonnie looked to Marceline for some kind of heroic rescue and saw her standing on the lobotomy rock, looking up at the sky, head held back like an idiot. She saw Mike do the same. A bright scratch was coursing its way across the perfect glass surface. Burning up red and yellow and white.

‘How inconvenient,’ Mike said.

The meteorite burnt right through their chest. Bonnie fell to the ground with the dissolving liquid that was Mike’s body, bubbling and frothing like a lava lamp on speed until it shrank together and sank into the dust. Mike left no trace of themselves. No samples, no evidence, and no answers to her questions.

God, it was such a shame to see them go, Bonnie thought. But that’s what they deserved for trying to give her ex-girlfriend a lobotomy. She didn’t need an alien for that; they could just go to Claire’s.

Marceline stood on the rock staring at the space where Mike had been reduced to nothing. She came up to Bonnie and helped her to her feet, and Bonnie could not resist the urge to hug her as tight as she could. Behind them the meteorite that had tumbled haplessly from between the stars spat and hissed in the little crater it had made. It was hardly bigger than a football.

Bonnie realised that Mike might have been the first and last encounter that mankind had with alien life. No one in the scientific world would ever believe the story. Not even the dented monolith would be enough evidence (even if it hadn’t disappeared when Bonnie went to check on it later). But it didn’t matter. Bonnie realised she didn’t even care. Because Marceline was safe, and all their stupid arguments seemed even more pointless now.

‘I’m so sorry I got so angry about the car. I’m sorry I ignored you. I’m sorry the alien I trusted knocked you unconscious and tried to give you a lobotomy. I’m so sorry, Marceline,’ Bonnie muttered. She fought back the urge to cry. It was a losing battle. Instead, she hugged Marceline as closely as she could. She had forgotten how nice it was to be so close to her.

‘It’s okay,’ Marceline laughed. Bonnie sensed there was something else to be said but she didn’t say it. The desert howled with emptiness all around them. Instead Marceline said: ‘The car breaking down was worth it. You’re kind of hot in that grubby vest, you know?’

Bonnie looked down at the oil-stained vest she was wearing from fixing the car and changed the subject. ‘Were you jealous?’

‘Of?’

‘Of Mike, you ding-dong.’

‘What? No! Obviously,’ Marceline scoffed, pushing her hair out of her face. ‘I know evil when I see it.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Bonnie said, ‘nothing more evil than a pair of huge anime tiddies.’ 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some of the formatting got messed up on this chapter and I couldn't fix it so sorry for inconsistencies.  
> Anyways, thanks for all your comments, glad to see people are enjoying this! I've made a blood oath to myself to finish it so stay tuned...


	5. Rain Storms, Homicide, and Jam Doughnuts

‘Marcy, you have to pull over,’ Bonnie told her. Marceline was peering over the wheel in an attempt to see through the sheets and sheets of solid rain. The desert had become grey mountain, and the grey mountain was weeping like a hungry baby. They were listening to a compilation CD that switched from Miles Davis to Motorhead. Marceline did not remember making it; the second it seemed to make sense it managed to get more confusing. Currently playing was Katy Perry’s _Hot and Cold._ It could not have been more at odds with the gloom and the rain. 

‘There’s nowhere _to_ pull over, pea brain,’ Marceline scowled. Her whole body was tensed up, her brain felt like it was being crushed by her skull from either sides like the scene in the garbage chute in _Star Wars._ God, would she kill for a jam doughnut right then; she had been starting to think about killing Bonnie, too. Either killing her or kissing her. Was Bonnie thinking the same thing? Was she sitting there, thinking about either murdering our making out with Marceline, and wondering if Marceline was thinking about it in turn. _Fuck_ , she thought, _I can’t do these mind games, I’m not a teenager anymore_. Though Bonnie was doing a good job of making her feel like it.

‘There! Marceline, turn!’ Bonnie ordered. When Marceline didn’t react fast enough, Bonnie yanked the wheel, sending them sliding off the slip road. Marceline slammed on the breaks. They skidded to a stop. The engine cut out, the only noise was the rain fall, her own panicked breath, and the blood pounding in her ears. Bonnie’s hand was on her thigh.

‘What the fuck was that?’ Marceline said, her face hot.

‘You drive too long and you’ll end up like a melted ice cream outside a church in the south of France in the middle of August. You’re stressed, Marcy, and the longer you drive the more dangerous it is. We both need a rest, okay? Look, there are lights on in that house up there. Even if we sleep in the car it might be a good place to wait out all this rain,’ Bonnie said, finally removing her hand from Marceline’s thigh. Marceline gave a sigh of relief, or was it disappointment?

They drove up around unlit harpin bends to reach the house Bonnie had spotted. The house emerged through the trees, nestled in the crook of the mountain’s elbow. A stream ran through the driveway; the second Marceline had driven over the bridge she realised it might have not been able to hold the car’s weight, but the fact they weren’t halfway down the cliff already told her she’d had nothing to worry about.

It would be a shame to have called the house a house. It was an indulgent chalet, little squares of yellow light shining through the stacks of pine logs. Smoke trickled out from a chimney stack, expensive cars sat out on the driveway. A few yards in front of the porch was an old fountain, no longer running, about to overflow with rainwater.

‘I’ll do it,’ Bonnie said. Before Marceline could even argue, she jumped out of the car and sprinted for the cover of the porch. The doorbell rang, unheard by Marceline, who watched Bonnie and wished she knew what she was thinking. Marceline was feeling things she hadn’t felt in a long time, but her head was so crammed full of other shit she couldn’t figure anything out. Plus, Bonnie was confusing as hell. One minute they were eyeball-to-eyeball arguing over which CD to listen to, and the next Bonnie was all giggles and back-handed flirting, and putting _her hand on Marceline’s thigh._ But it wasn’t just as simple as declaring her feelings. If it were anyone else she’d stop joking around and say how she felt, but things were complicated with Bonnie. Their friendship was fragile, and anything more than that could be catastrophic. It had happened before. 

The door opened and Marceline watched the conversation between Bonnie and the door-opening man, their mouths moving silently. They both looked at the car and back to each other again, and the man nodded several times. Bonnie ran back over to the car.

‘Just grab what you need,’ she said, the rain already soaking through her hair. Marceline grabbed a backpack off the backseat and stuffed it full of stuff for the both of them. Bonnie grabbed the box Grandad Chad was wrapped up in. Marceline thought it was weird, the car wasn’t going anywhere, but out of respect for the dead man and his granddaughter she didn’t ask.

The house was a mansion made out of pine wood. Grey dust settled everywhere, a heavy smell of mothballs and woodsmoke, and absolutely everything was made of pine. From the doors and walls and the staircase with its faded red runner, like blood tumbling down rocks, to the tables and chairs. Marceline and Bonnie stood in the entryway, looking up at the stairs that curled into the gloom, gaps in the roof dripping rainwater on the Persian rugs. It was late evening already, the clock by one of the closed doors chimed half-past ten, and Marceline had only just realised how tired she was.

The man who had answered the door returned, two blankets in his arms. He looked a bit like a pine tree, too, starting to silver in the weather. ‘Ladies, you’re very welcome to stay the night if you need to. There’s a free room upstairs with a lock on the door so there’s nothing to worry about. We have three other guests staying with us to wait out the storm, so please don’t be alarmed if you run into them. My name’s Oak.’

‘Bonnie,’ Bonnie said.

‘Marceline.’

They shook hands. Oak smiled at them almost pitifully, but Marceline wasn’t sure if it was aimed at them or himself. The very air around him seemed to be depressed with his despair. 

A second man who looked identical to the first if only a bit angrier burst into the room. ‘Haven’t had any guests for years and suddenly we’ve got five of them. There’s barely a bottle of milk in the fridge,’ he grumbled. ‘Mother’s going to be livid.’

‘Redmond?’ whined a voice from upstairs. The second man, Redmond, rolled his eyes and stormed up the stairs two at a time.

‘Coming, Mother!’ He called. He came back shortly with an old woman in his arms. She wore two fur coats, different animals, one over the other, and gripped an ivory cane in one withered hand.

‘More guests,’ the woman grumbled, set down gently on her feet like a fragile porcelain doll. The woman was so ancient Marceline couldn’t even guess old she was. In her presence, both Oak and Redmond stood like soldiers guarding a palace, only in knitted jumpers rather than bright red uniforms. They had suddenly become robotic. ‘Come on then, cough up. I’ll need something from you as insurance. I can’t have strangers living in my father’s house with nothing to lose.’

‘I’ve got my car keys,’ Marceline said. Mother shook her head. ‘Well then there’s nothing. We don’t have anything.’

Mother circled them, eyeing them like a vulture eyes a dying animal. She thrust her cane into the hands of one of her sons and seized the box containing Grandad Chad’s urn.

‘No!’ Bonnie said. Mother snarled at her, baring the absence of a few teeth.

‘This will be perfect, then. You’ll get it back when you leave,’ she began to tear through the tape Marceline had watched Bonnie carefully wrap the box in with a pointed talon of a fingernail.

‘Stop! Those are my grandad’s ashes!’ Bonnie said, seizing the box.

Mother glared at her, tussling over the box with Bonnie like children with a toy. ‘Would you like to stay, or not?’

Marceline suddenly felt very guilty about the priceless bass guitar hidden in her car.

At Bonnie’s silence, Mother said: ‘That’s what I thought,’ and ripped the box from between Bonnie’s fingers. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take good care of him. Oak, show these girls their room.’

‘Yes, Mother,’ said Oak, flinching as she passed him.

Oak led them down a hallway and up a second flight of stairs to a corridor of doors and showed them the room they were to share. ‘This is the only key,’ he said, handing it to Marceline. She wasn’t sure if she believed him. There was a flash of lightning outside, casting skeletal light across their faces.

‘Thank you,’ Marceline said, and shut the door behind him. ‘Hey, it’ll be okay.’

‘I know,’ Bonnie sniffled. Marceline reached out to hug her. Bonnie accepted it with a heavy sigh. 

Marceline dragged the dust sheet off the old bed. The mattress was like stone. The room was cold and dark, there was a single bare bulb on the ceiling and a dead fireplace on one wall, the skull of a deer on another. The tiny bathroom was filled with spiders and cobwebs.

There was only one bed. ‘I’ll sleep on the floor,’ Marceline said.

‘Don’t bother. I don’t care. It’s too cold for it,’ Bonnie replied, collapsing backwards in a leather chair. ‘And it’ll just be a waste. I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep anyway.’

‘You’re worried that bad?’

‘Of course I’m worried that bad,’ Bonnie said, incredulous, ‘some creepy old woman has my grandpa. Wouldn’t you be worried?

Marceline imagined the sadness she’d be attacked with when she’d have to lose Simon. Bonnie must have been feeling the same way about her grandfather. It made her heart ache to think of the grief Bonnie was in. She wanted to hug her tight and make it all magically go away. If only the world worked that way.

Another flash of lightning was followed quickly by its twin crack of thunder.

‘It’ll work out fine, I’m sure. We’ll wake up in the morning and everything will be sunny and wonderful again. You know what, the next town we stop in, we can go to the movies or something for a change. How does that sound? I heard there’s a remake of _Heat Signature_ that’s meant to be pretty terrible.’

Bonnie nodded morosely. ‘That sounds nice.’

‘Alright. Try and sleep, brainlord. You need it,’ Marceline told her. She went to get changed in the bathroom full of spiders. She left the key on the mantlepiece.

When she woke up in the morning it was cold and lonely. The sun cut through the floral printed curtains, revealing the swirling patterns the dust made in the air. Outside birds screeched their morning songs, and Marceline was very aware that Bonnie was not there with her. Everything seemed pointless without Bonnie. Marceline hated that feeling almost as much as she hated what it meant.

‘Fuck,’ she muttered to herself, staring at the ceiling, ‘what am I going to do about this?’

She lay there for a few minutes trying to remember the details of her dream before she heard a voice cry out in the house, doors slam, and footsteps stampede the hallways. Marceline staggered out of bed, grabbing the closest jumper available—one of Bonnie’s, the white one with the stripes—and wandered into the hallway.

A man was running down towards her, his face was only half shaved and still pudgy and baby-ish underneath. His eyes were wide with worry. ‘Come, quick! It’s the old woman!’ he bleated.

‘What?’ Marceline grumbled. Where the hell was Bonnie?

‘The old woman’s dead,’ he said. A bolt of dread went right through her. ‘Redmond and Oak want to see everyone in the kitchen. Come on!’

Marceline followed him, a heavy weight settling in her chest. The stench of death had filled the whole house.

Bonnie stood in the kitchen biting her nails. Redmond was there, guarding her and the other guests who had turned up in the kitchen, a barren room that smelt like last night’s cold mac and cheese and sadness. The stovetop was covered in grease and filth, the sink was full of dirty dishes, a knife missing from the knife block. The rain had stopped, thank God, but there were still huge puddles outside, the ground rejecting the water after being dry for so long. But that was the least of her concerns.

The old woman was dead, and she had found the body.

She hadn’t killed her, of course. But it wasn’t going to be easy proving it. She had snuck into Mother’s room early in the morning to find Grandad Chad’s ashes and replace the box wish something about as heavy like in _Indiana Jones,_ but better, because it would have worked. It would have cured her anxieties. She would have been able to sleep peacefully next to Marceline and wake up late… tangled up together… playing with her hair…

Instead she had found a withered little body strewn over the Victorian bearskin rug, a stab to the heart, blood absolutely everywhere. She had seen cadavers before and done plenty of dissections but Bonnie didn’t know that someone so shrivelled could have so much blood. She hadn’t screamed at the sight. She had only wanted to go back in time ten seconds and avoid the whole catastrophe, walk past the door without touching it, but no matter how much she willed it to be so it did not happen. She was stuck there with a murdered old woman and a lot to explain. She couldn’t even switch the urn anymore. Tampering with a scene like that could have been fatal.

Redmond and Oak’s rooms were nearby, probably so they could call the old hag if she needed them. When she finally cried: ‘Help!’ they had come running.

Strangely enough, their reaction hadn’t been grief. An outcry of frustration from Redmond, a heavy sigh from Oak, both of which cancelled each other out to a feeling of relief. Oak began to cry and he and Redmond embraced each other in front of Mother’s corpse, but nothing about either of them looked like grief to Bonnie, who’d been getting pretty well acquainted with grief recently.

The kitchen now contained the old woman’s two sons, three burly backpackers, and a woman with her dog. Marceline finally joined them, wearing her jumper and looking lost, and came straight over to her.

‘Bon,’ Marceline said in a voice so soft it made Bonnie want to melt. But now was probably just about the worst time.

‘Alright, everyone, the police are on their way,’ Redmond announced over the table. Coffee had been served hot and black to their guests. There were malted milk biscuits, too. It didn’t look much like a crime scene at all. Though Bonnie couldn’t eat. ‘As I’m sure you’ve all heard, Mother was killed in the night.’

‘As far as we are concerned,’ Oak continued, ‘there weren’t any break-ins. Which means the killer is in this room. Now you need to understand, we aren’t accusing anyone of anything yet. But the police will be here soon, and they will likely want to question you. If you could be as compliant and helpful as possible this should all be over soon.’

‘Who found her?’ asked the dog lady, looking pretty much like nothing could have possibly inconvenienced her more. Her dog was rolled over on its back, begging to be pet. No one was petting it.

Bonnie felt Marceline squeeze her hand. She’d hardly noticed she’d grabbed it in the first place. Funny, she thought, how it was still so natural. ‘I did,’ Bonnie said.

‘Please, please,’ Redmond sighed, ‘leave the questioning for the police.’

Bonnie watched the backpackers and the woman murmur amongst each other, shooting her wicked glances.

‘I didn’t do it, Marcy. I didn’t, I didn’t do it, they’re going to think I did it,’ Bonnie muttered. Marceline wrapped her up in her arms. Bonnie decided that it was the safest place to be.

‘I believe you. Of course you didn’t do it. Don’t worry, the police will figure it out. And if not,’ Marceline continued, lowering her voice, ‘we’ll grab Grandad Chad and bust out of here and run away, change our names and get boring jobs and get old and fat and weird so no one will ever find us.’

Bonnie laughed half-heartedly. ‘Yeah, okay. I like your jumper by the way.’

Marceline tipped her head to one side and gave her a crooked smile that dissolved about 99% of Bonnie’s problems. ‘Oh, you like it? I got it off this cute girl. Don’t tell her I took it, though.’

Bonnie felt her stomach constrict. She reached out to play with the fabric on the sleeves, drawing Marceline just a little closer. ‘I won’t tell anyone. Even so, I’m pretty sure she won’t mind considering how good it looks on you.’

Redmond sternly interrupted them. ‘Do you guys mind? My mother just died.’

They jumped apart and mumbled out some hasty apologies.

After Redmond and Oak, the detective wanted to speak to Bonnie first. Just as the officers called her in the forensics team arrived. And the ambulance to take Mother’s body to the morgue. 

She entered the living room and was asked to sit across a coffee table from a man with the stature of a cannonball. There were two other policemen in the room. One by the door, the other just behind Bonnie, breathing down her neck. The living room smelt like sweat and mould. The leather sofa squeaked as she sat down.

The detective set his phone between them to record the conversation. On the coffee table was a paper bag full of jam doughnuts. He offered them to her. She declined. ‘Miss Bonnie Butlers, yes?’

‘Yes,’ Bonnie said. She shouldn’t be so nervous for someone who hadn’t killed anyone. Her palms were sweating like crazy. She was still nauseous from the sight of the dead old woman.

‘I’m detective Einar. I will tell you, as I will tell the others, that it is extremely unlikely that anyone broke into the house in the early hours of the morning to kill Mrs Juniper. The house is particularly isolated, and as I gather you and your girlfriend, like the others, were sheltering from the storm, yes?’

‘She’s not my girlfriend,’ Bonnie blurted, _though sometimes I kind of wish she was_ , ‘but, yes, we stopped here last night to get off the road.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘To Butterscotch Bay to scatter my grandad’s ashes,’ Bonnie replied. Though with Marceline’s complete lack of a sense of direction, sometimes it didn’t feel like they were going anywhere.

‘I’m sorry for your loss. These ashes you mention are the same ashes which the family took from you last night for insurance? Promised to be returned upon your departure?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you explain why you were in Mrs Juniper’s room in the early hours of the morning?’

‘Well,’ Bonnie said, taking a deep breath, ‘I couldn’t sleep because I was worried about not having my grandad’s ashes with them. I didn’t feel safe knowing they were in the hands of someone else. So I decided I’d take the urn out of the box and replace it with something about the same weight—’

‘This candle,’ Einar interrupted, holding up a candle in a Ziplock bag.

‘Yes. I was going to replace it in the box so that the old b—so that _Mrs Juniper_ or her sons wouldn’t suspect anything when they gave the box back. I assumed it would be in Mrs Juniper’s room, I assumed Mrs Juniper would have the master bedroom, so I located the master bedroom and found her there.’

‘Can you describe what she looked like?’

Bonnie felt sick at the thought. But of course she could describe it. The image didn’t leave her mind. She wished Marceline were sitting there, holding her hand, telling her it would be okay. She wanted to be held by her until the pain and the horrible picture went away. But the world didn’t work quite like that.

‘And you’re quite certain you weren’t taking revenge on Mrs Juniper to retrieve the ashes?’

‘Yes. Extremely certain.’

‘And neither of Mrs Juniper’s sons compelled you to such violent ends.’

‘No. I didn’t speak to either of them after Oak showed me the spare room. Not until I found the body and called for help.’

‘So you didn’t kill Mrs Juniper in the early hours of this morning?’

‘No.’

‘And do you have any ideas on who might have been the culprit?’

Bonnie thought about it. ‘Well, I don’t know anything about the other guests, but if they were all here to wait out the storm it seems impossible any of them would have a motive. And, not to, you know, throw anyone in here, but when Oak and Redmond saw the body, something about their response wasn’t really right. I don’t know how to describe it. It was like they were relieved.’

‘I see,’ Einar said, scribbling something down with a ballpoint pen. Then he moved briskly and bluntly onwards. ‘Right. And your… friend… Melanie.’

‘Marceline,’ Bonnie corrected him.

‘Of course. Marceline didn’t have anything to do with it? Did you tell her your plan to swipe the ashes?’

‘No. She was already asleep. And she sleeps like a rock so I knew I wouldn’t wake her by coming and going.’

‘I see,’ said the detective, nodding thoughtfully. ‘That’s all for now. Thank you for your time, Miss Butlers.’

Bonnie was shown out of the room.

Marceline was sitting in kitchen chatting quietly with the three backpackers. Bonnie tried to smile politely at the older woman with the dog, but she did not smile back. When she sat down Marceline took her hand under the table, smoothing her knuckles over, squeezing it gently. An officer came in and took one of the backpackers into the living room for questioning. Oak and Redmond stood at the sink, one of them washing, the other drying the dirty plates from the lunch they’d thrown together. Caesar salad.

‘Alright?’ Marceline asked. All Bonnie could do was sigh and nod. ‘Get a load of these guys,’ she said with a menacing smirk. ‘They do this thing where they all go camping to sit around a campfire and cuddle for a whole weekend.’

Bonnie looked at the guys, slightly sheepish, pushing each other around like overgrown puppies.

‘Men,’ Bonnie said dryly.

‘Hey, come on, not like girls don’t do it too,’ said the baby faced one, wiggling his eyebrows at the two of them.

‘Woah, we’re not together,’ Marceline reassured him. The annoying voice in the back of Bonnie’s brain piped up again: _I wish we were._ It was an irrational desire; she already knew what a mess it would turn out to be.

‘Are you sure?’ said the other, with a long scar across his chin. It made him look a lot older than he probably was.

‘We dated when we were teenagers,’ Bonnie reluctantly told them.

‘We fucked a lot, too,’ Marceline said, earning a light smack on the shoulder from Bonnie. Her blood was running hot in her face. The backpackers laughed raucously in tune with Marceline’s cackle, like they were drinking together in a bar somewhere, not sitting around in a murder scene.

‘Really? You and the princess, over here? How’d you break up?’ asked baby face. Both of them clammed up. They hadn’t talked about it, Bonnie thought. They had never really talked about it—Bonnie was too proud and too embarrassed to even think about talking about it. Instead, they had just done a good job of pretending it hadn’t happened, even though it was the first thing that came to mind after the funeral when she’d whacked Marceline in the face with the church door. It wasn’t always possible to look at her without feeling the same old pain stab her in the heart.

‘We went to different universities and long distance didn’t work out,’ Marceline said. The backpackers nodded, satisfied with Marceline’s half-lie. Bonnie let go of her hand.

The police officers took Marceline in for questioning after the first backpacker then again after everyone else, hours later, when the rain from last night had dried up enough for Bonnie to almost forget last night’s rain. The sun had moved so that it now shone bright white squares onto the long dinner table. They spoke to Marceline for half an hour, the longest half an hour Bonnie ever thought she’d have to endure, until Marceline emerged. She was wearing a jacket over Bonnie’s jumper. Oak and Redmond went to go and speak to detective Einar again before they left.

‘What did they want?’ Bonnie asked. Marceline had red jam on her bottom lip, and sugar on her fingers.

‘Oh, just a few details of stuff they didn’t catch last time.’ She looked around the kitchen. Redmond and Oak turned up again. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

Then Marceline went over to the woman with the dog and spoke to her very quietly. The woman stood up, leaving her dog behind, and followed Marceline out of the kitchen.

‘What was that about?’ asked the first backpacker, who unlike baby face and scar chin did not have anything to visually distinguish himself by. He was as plain as white bread.

‘I don’t know,’ Bonnie said.

Five minutes passed. Then ten. Bonnie drummed her fingers on the table. There was nothing to do. She was worrying about Marceline.

‘Where’s the bathroom?’ she asked abruptly.

‘I’ll show you,’ Oak said, and led her to another spider-infested tiled room with the oldest toilet in the world. Bonnie went in, locked the door, and waited to hear Oak’s footsteps recede. When he was gone, she wondered around looking for Marceline, though not daring to call out her name.

In the maze of the pine wood labyrinth she spotted an open door. Through the open crack she could see bookshelves. And hear hushed voices.

‘I _know_ it was you,’ she heard Marceline say. ‘The cops don’t have a clue, but I’ll tell them everything you just told me.’

‘Over my dead body, you will,’ said the woman. There was fury in her voice. Bonnie felt her heart rate accelerate like it was in the Indy 500.

There was a cry of anger. Followed by a yell of pain.

‘Marceline!’ Bonnie called out.

It was too late.

In the final aisle of the library Marceline stood skewered by a kitchen knife. Her eyes were as wide as a football pitch. A wet patch showed up through her jacket. ‘No!’

The woman sprinted from the room. Marceline pulled the knife out and threw it away from herself, then slumped on the floor against a row of hard-bound encyclopaedias, the kind no one makes anymore, and groaning in pain. Bonnie knelt by her, tears filling her eyes, cradling Marceline’s head in her lap. How was this happening? Marceline couldn’t die. She had done plenty of stupid stuff that should have killed her, and she was still alive, which meant Marceline couldn’t die, right? Could someone this sexy die, or really ever disappear?

‘Bonnie…’ Marceline rasped. Her hand weakly gripped Bonnie’s wrist. ‘I’m dying… oh… the pain…’

‘I’m sorry, Marcy. I’m so sorry for everything…’ Bonnie sobbed. The wet patch spread underneath Bonnie’s jacket. She hesitated with the zip, afraid to see the gory mess the knife had left behind. ‘I just… I care about you, okay? I care about you so much.’

In her mind, maybe Bonnie had imagined that Marceline would always materialise one day, standing on the opposite platform in the subway, getting on a bus the same time she was getting on, running into each other at a friends’ wedding—or a funeral. A part of her still believed in a little fantasy where they’d make it up to each other, sort it all out, and maybe even get old and wrinkly and weird somewhere far away. Not in this creepy cabin like the guts of a pine-tree eating monster, filled with dust and what smelt suspiciously like jam. Losing Marceline had to be impossible.

‘I can see a light, Bonnie… Bonnie… I’m going to meet God.’

‘No you aren’t. Stay with me, please, please, stay with me. I don’t know what I’ll do without you. Please, stay with me.’

Bonnie bit her cheek and unzipped Marceline’s jacket.

Her panic instantly disappeared. It was replaced by an embarrassment as yellow as custard and lead nitrate.

Marceline burst out into uncontrollable laughter, rolling out of her lap and onto the floor.

‘Are you fucking kidding me,’ Bonnie groaned, wiping tears out of her eyes. Out from the jacket had spilled at least a dozen jam doughnuts. Marceline had been wearing a stab vest that now covered in sugar and jam. Doughnut guts covered everything: the floor, her jeans, their hands. At least Marceline had had the decency to take of Bonnie's jumper. ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’

‘Bonnie! It’s okay!’ Marceline said, a smile across her face brighter than the sunbeams through the window. ‘We found the murderer! They needed the murder weapon and they found it!’

‘What?’ Bonnie demanded. Marceline had leapt to her feet and was skipping up and down between the aisles, completely unharmed. She came to a stop and planted both feet either side of the jam-covered knife.

‘The police set this up. Well, not about the murder, but this part. Look out the window, they’ve got her now,’ she instructed. Bonnie went to the library’s window, leaning against the ledge, and could see through the shutters two officers wrangle with the woman to get handcuffs on her. ‘It was that creepy dog woman that did it, pea-brain. She was the old woman’s illegitimate first child. She was planning to frame those creepy twins and steal the inheritance as next of kin. But then we all turned up during the storm and ruined her plans.

‘Oh,’ Bonnie said, trying to untangle her brain. It was tied up worse than a pretzel in a storm drain. ‘I hate your guts.’ She wished she meant it.

‘And there you were telling me you care about me. Hey, hey, princess, I care about you too. I thought you knew that already,’ Marceline said. Bonnie was suddenly more embarrassed than she was before.

‘I feel so stupid! How come you convinced me you got stabbed? There’s no way you’d be meeting God. You absolutely belong in the devil’s hairy ass crack for all eternity, and I've heard he's got IBS. Plus, I’ve seen you act, you’re hardly Brad Pitt or anything.’

‘I got stabbed twice in college. Once on purpose, the second time by accident,’ Marceline replied.

‘Is that a lie?’

‘Why would I lie about that?’ Bonnie was conflicted by the knowledge that she knew many, many people who would like to stab Marceline, and that Marceline loved to confuse her by telling outrageous lies.

‘This is exactly why you belong to the devil’s hairy ass crack.’ Bonnie stepped on a doughnut to exaggerate her point. Jam oozed all over the pine wood floorboards. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

Marceline waved out the window at detective Einar, who waddled as quickly as he could on his cannonball legs back into the house.

‘If I belong up the devil’s ass crack,’ Marceline said after a minute of contemplation, ‘then you belong up God’s dickhole. Oh, and he’s got kidney stones.’


	6. Dancing, Fake Jeans, and Sexy, Sexy Arson

It was the middle of the afternoon and Bonnie was driving, cruising around corners as they swept lazily through the streets of another town in the mountains. The mid-rise apartment buildings and run-down pharmacies all more or less looked the same; shops on street level, closed in the evenings with the awnings pulled back, the shutters covered in graffiti, the patch-work roads, the gloomy cafes with metal chairs out front. They became indistinguishable from the last one, the scenery between them the only difference, their names often slipping from memory completely. What Bonnie knew she would remember, though, was driving slowly, the sun coming through the window, listening to Marceline’s mixtape of slow songs that chugged along like waves hitting the sand on a beach. 

Marceline was singing along to one by Fountains of Wayne that Bonnie vaguely recognised. Her rich, sonorous voice following the melody, sometimes trailing off to harmonise with it, always stirring something undeniable in Bonnie’s chest.

_Slow down, there’s gonna be trouble, you’re gonna forget what you’re doing._

_One false move, baby, suddenly everything’s ruined._

‘Hey, check it out,’ Bonnie said, the song ending. Marceline sat up in her seat to look at a sign for an old dance hall just of the main street.

‘Are you trying to make me look at the homeless guy sitting in the doorway for that corner shop? What’s wrong with you, Bonnie?’ Marceline said. Bonnie rolled her eyes.

‘Let’s go dancing.’

Marceline huffed, ‘No way.’

‘Come on,’ Bonnie pleaded, turning a corner to find somewhere to park just off of the town’s little square, ‘you _so_ owe me from pretending to die in front of me.’ Marceline giggled. It was a kind of giggle that made it hard for Bonnie to stay angry at her. That and her stupid shit-eating grin. And the big pretty eyes. ‘It wasn’t funny.’

‘Alright, fine,’ Marceline groaned. It had been uncharacteristically easy to persuade her. Bonnie kept her smile to herself. ‘I hate dancing.’ She knew from experience that that wasn’t true. She glanced over at Marceline, leaning out the window, the wind bristling through her long hair. Bonnie knew that if there was a God he was not merciful, because it was only cruel that Marceline looked like _that._ She almost forgot she was driving.

_What am I doing,_ she thought, _feeling like this again?_

They parked and got out. Bonnie watched Marceline triple-check that she’d locked the car. The dance hall wasn’t open yet so they got filter coffee in the square and watched people walking past in lots of bright blue too-tight denim despite the heat, and birds settle in the trees whose roots messed up the pavestones. Time flew by, and before they knew it Marceline had smoked her last two cigarettes and it was six o’clock.

Outside the dance hall was a skinny looking, black hair greased back, wearing jeans so skinny it looked like they might cut the circulation off to his feet. ‘Want some jeans? Real stuff, real cheap,’ one of them barked. Underneath his jacket Bonnie saw a well-loved Madonna t-shirt covered in stains like a baby’s bib.

‘No, thank you,’ Bonnie replied, trying not to make eye contact with him.

‘It says “Mangler” on the tag, dude. I’m not stupid,’ Marceline said. Bonnie couldn’t help but laugh. The greasy man bundled up the jeans into a bag and stormed off down the street. The fabric around his legs was too tight for him to be able to walk properly, so he was walking a like he’d just pissed himself and was absolutely furious about it. 

The dance hall was sort of sad and empty. Clearly coming to the end of its life, all the windows were boarded up halfway, the curtains were faded, and the wallpaper was peeling. In the corner was one of those big chunky TVs that passed the time between its final use and being thrown out by collecting dust. On one side of the room was a fold-out table with plastic cups of orange squash. The only thing new in the whole hall were the signs advertising the sale of cheap designer jeans down the road. Bonnie and Marceline where easily the youngest people there by at least forty years. A man sat at the back of the room with his own table with a cassette player, a long cord running into the wall speakers. A very wobbly Buddy Holly song hummed off the tape and through the room. Despite the boards on the windows, the evening sun managed to fill the room with light to the point it might burst, orange sunbeams resting over a spare spot on the dancefloor. 

‘It’s all old people, Bon,’ Marceline whispered.

‘Yes, and? Are old people not allowed to dance? You shouldn’t be so judgemental,’ Bonnie whispered back.

‘God, you’re so lucky I like you,’ Marceline said. Bonnie wasn’t sure if it was meant to be a compliment or not. She took Marceline’s hand and led them into the middle of the room where the sunbeams beckoned. They started to move, Marceline put her hand against Bonnie’s waist, and she had to repress a small gasp of delight. A feeling she’d long forgotten was overflowing from between her ribs, the one that accompanied a dream of summer, and music, racing heart beats and too-good things and pretty girls who played the bass. She’d thought it had been gone forever; the dream disappeared one hopeless winter swearing it would not return. But now here it was again, holding her hand as they rocked side to side. _Oh no, oh no, oh no._

‘So,’ Bonnie said. Marceline span her around and caught her again with a smirk plastered across her face.

‘So?’

‘For someone who didn’t want to come, you look like you’re having fun.’

‘Turns out you can be fun to spend time with sometimes. Who knew.’

‘Who knew you liked dancing to ‘50s love songs.’

‘Don’t tell anyone, you’ll blow my cover.’

‘Your cover for what?’

‘That I’m all sappy and soft on the inside,’ Marceline muttered. She was simultaneously making Bonnie extremely dizzy and being the only thing keeping her from melting. Though they were dancing only gently Bonnie could feel her heart pump hot, flustered blood all through her body. She dreaded the instant it found her knees. Though maybe, just maybe, when it did Marceline would catch her.

The song changed, they staggered a little to pick up the new rhythm, Marceline put both her hands on Bonnie’s waist, making her stomach do backflips off the top of the Empire State Building. Did she know what she was doing? What all this teasing and flirting on purpose? Bonnie couldn’t tell. She was focussed on dancing, keeping herself together, not missing a step, all whilst playing a game where if she so much as glanced at Marceline’s lips she’d lose.

The song changed again, and Bonnie rested her head against Marceline’s shoulder, sighing as she wrapped her arms all the way around her waist for them to sway side to side. She had one ear against Marceline’s collarbone, one hand toying with the soft hair at the nape of her neck. Marceline gave a long, comfortable sigh.

‘You know, I’ve had a really nice time so far. With you, I mean, driving around,’ Bonnie said, thinking about closing her eyes and falling into a dream where they stayed like this forever. She lifted her head up to Marceline smile softly, soft enough to bring a puppy back to life.

‘I’m having fun too.’

For half a second, Bonnie even thought that Marceline was leaning in.

‘Hey, you two,’ came a voice. It was the cassette tape man. The music cut out suddenly. ‘Packing up time.’ Bonnie looked around and was surprised to see they were the only people left. Marceline took her hands off her waist and she tried not to mourn their absence. 

‘Let’s go,’ Marceline said, the softness gone, the dream was over again. Back to normal again, tiptoeing around the tangles of the aftermath of all the old baggage they’d left behind. 

Outside, the man trying to sell them rip-off jeans was gone, and Bonnie was yet again very aware of the amount of people wearing said knock-off jeans walking around despite the oppressive July heat. Marceline said: ‘Where next, princess?’ 

Bonnie was going to open her mouth to say they should find somewhere to sleep when a little boy, no older than twelve, came rushing up to them in double—no— _triple_ denim, despite the leftover heat from the day. The jeans were too small, showing off is ankles, and the jacket swamped him. Bonnie caught sight of a red label branding the jacket: “Stevis”.

‘What’s up, kid?’ Marceline said when he grabbed her wrist. ‘Are you lost?’

‘Why have you come here?’ he begged them. ‘You shouldn’t have come. The Denim Boys will get you. Like they’ve gotten all of us. You’ll be cursed to wear denim forever and you’ll never be able to leave.’

‘Where are your parents?’ Bonnie asked, bending over so they saw eye to eye. His bottom lip began to tremble.

‘Get out of here before the sun sets! Or you’ll never be able to wear jeans that fit you! The Denim Boys will curse you forever! Aaaaaaaaaaah!’ Then he turned down the street and ran away.

‘Poor kid,’ Marceline said. ‘Anyways—,’

‘You two,’ hissed a voice. Both of them span to see another greasy jean-hawker lurching towards them from across the street. He had layers and layers of blue denim in his arms. ‘You two aren’t wearing our jeans.’

‘I’m good, thanks, my ass already looks really good in these,’ Marceline said, gesturing to her shorts. Bonnie had to agree with her there.

‘We don’t have any cash,’ Bonnie told him.

‘Oh? Well… you don’t buy from the Denim Boys with cash…’

Before Bonnie even knew it they were surrounded by pasty looking men in skinny jeans and Madonna t-shirts. She clutched the hem of Marceline’s shirt between her fingers.

‘I’m sure we can work out an agreement that works for everyone,’ Bonnie said.

‘I’ve got this, Bon, don’t worry,’ Marceline said. She smacked her hands together and yelled: ‘Come on then, you want a fight?’

‘Marcy, there’s literally six of them,’ Bonnie whispered.

‘Yeah, and?’ Marceline replied.

‘Get em, boys!’ barked the first one. Marceline went to tackle him and got clonked around the head. She fell to the ground, unconscious. Bonnie sighed and put her hands in the air. The sun set behind her, casting one long shadow down the road. In the windows of the apartment buildings looking onto the street, people pulled their shutters and turned off their lights. No one was coming to help.

The Denim Boys duct taped her hands together and threw her and sleeping Marceline in the back of a pickup truck.

‘You’ll buy jeans from us…’ said one of the Denim Boys, ‘just you wait.’

Even when they slammed the car doors shut, Bonnie could hear them cackling with laughter from inside the cab.

Marceline woke up, her hands bound, and with a headache. This had happened before, but it usually after distorted nights somewhere in a grubby student house that was falling apart at the edges, and she’d never been wearing clothes. Not in some creepy backroom on a recently deep-cleaned carpet, next to Bonnie, not even with her shoes off.

‘Are you awake?’ Bonnie whispered to her.

‘No,’ Marceline yawned, wincing at the pain in her head. ‘Why are we tied up? I didn’t know you were into this.’

Looking around, they were in some kind of retail store back-room. Racks upon racks of jeans and denim jackets and denim shorts and denim hats and denim sneakers. There was a small shelf covered in lit candles sitting below a framed Madonna poster from the ‘80s. On closer inspection, Madonna memorabilia was scattered all across the walls; signed pictures, old concert tickets, mint-condition records. From the next room, maybe, came the faint sound of music playing. The air smelled like hair gel and dryer sheets.

‘The Denim Boys got us,’ Bonnie began, ‘they knocked you out and brought us here, and they want to make us wear their cursed jeans so that we’re stuck here forever, buying jeans from them.’

‘Why didn’t they knock you out?’

‘Because I wasn’t stupid enough to try and fight them, ding-dong,’ Bonnie seethed. Then, more softly, she asked: ‘does your head hurt?’

‘Only a little,’ Marceline lied. ‘Do you have a plan?’

‘Obviously.’ She could just imagine the smug smile plastered across Bonnie’s face. _Obviously_. ‘Can you reach that wall with your foot?’

Marceline stretched her leg out, wriggling them both a bit closer to the wall with the Madonna shrine on it. ‘Yeah?’

‘Kick it as hard as you can. They could come in at any moment, so don’t waste your chances,’ Bonnie told her. Marceline slammed the wall with her shoe. Once, twice, three times—on the fourth time the shelf wobbled off its fixings and the whole thing crashed to the floor, the candles toppling over and setting light to the carpet.

‘Oh, fuck!’

‘That was meant to happen,’ Bonnie said perfectly calmly. The carpet was catching quickly, puffing out grey, foul-smelling smoke. Marceline wasn’t in control when Bonnie shuffled them around so that the ropes that bound them together were dangling over the flames.

‘Ow, fuck!’

‘Shut up, you big baby,’ Bonnie said. The fire caught onto the rope and it pulled apart. Both of them jumped to their feet and they helped each other free their wrists. ‘Here.’ Bonnie rolled over a rack of knock-off jeans for Marceline to throw on the flames. Instead of smothering it, however, the blaze only grew greater, like a huge denim-devouring monster made out of yellow and red. The cheap fabric blackened and disintegrated almost instantly upon contact with the flames.

The door flew open with a slam. ‘What’s going on in here?’ bellowed the Denim Boys. From behind them came the tune of _Music_ by Madonna. A sweat breaking out across the back of her neck, Marceline threw another pile of jorts onto the blaze.

‘Screw you, you donks!’ Marceline yelled as the Denim Boys rushed towards them, whimpering as the smoke smarted their eyes, spluttering as it filled up their lungs.

‘Get the poster! Get the poster!’ chorused the Denim Boys. But on cue the poster’s frame fell off its nail, the glass shattering like a grenade and flying into the air, the old poster falling face-first into the jean-fire. It caught immediately. Bright blue sparks flew across the room, bouncing off the walls and the ceiling into the racks upon racks of knock-off denim products, setting them on fire. Maybe she imagined it, but Marceline was sure she’d heard a ghostly scream as the glossy paper was quickly consumed by the azure flames. The Denim Boys cried out in despair.

‘Come on!’ Bonnie called, holding her t-shirt over her nose and mouth. Marceline ran towards her at the back door and they escaped the building, leaving the sobbing Denim Boys behind, wallowing in their loss, the Madonna poster destroyed.

Bonnie had grabbed Marceline’s hand. They were breathing hard and fast they sprinted onto the street to watch the building go up in flames. Finally they came to a stop across from the shop and looked up at it in awe, fire starting to pour out the windows, black smoke pluming into the sky. The whole street was lit by a soft orange glow. 

They stood side by side as the inferno spread like hot butter over the building. Marceline would not have let Bonnie’s hand go for anything. She looked over at her to see her cast like a Pre-Raphaelite painting in the golden glow of the firelight, a loveliness so strong it stilled the breath in Marceline’s throat. She was like a good dream finally remembered, flying embers glimmering in her eyes.

Suddenly Bonnie broke her focus and turned to her, with a voice so gentle that Marceline knew in her heart what she was about to say: ‘Marcy—,’

She was cut off by a sudden explosion. The glass windows of the shop blew out, bright flowers of fire expanded and collapsed on themselves like it was Valentine’s day in Hell. It was beautiful. Car alarms wailed all the way down the street. Distantly, a fire engine’s horn wailed. 

Marceline’s brain returned to her skull after the terror of the shock to find herself holding as tightly onto Bonnie as she could, and Bonnie holding her back, gazing up at her and her with a wonder Marceline hadn’t thought she’d ever see again. Several moments passed with the world-breaking magnitude tower-toppling earthquakes. Within those several moments was more sexual tension than there was coke inside David Bowie. It made breathing the air between them almost impossible.

Marceline’s heart was in her throat.

She put her hands in Bonnie’s hair and kissed her as hard as she could. Bonnie sighed against her, a wave of elation spreading to every fraction of her body. Bonnie's hands pulling at Marceline’s collar, her lips sweet and hot.

Around them the cacophony continued. The building was collapsing in on itself, a fire alarm was ringing like a landline for a very successful telemarketing campaign, the street was filling up with people who’d come to celebrate the Denim Boys’ destruction. All Marceline could think about was kissing Bonnie and never letting go, at least until she fainted or blew up or fell through the floor in heavenly free fall forever. Bonnie pulled away to draw in a breath, her laughter drifting off with the smoke in the long black sky.

Down the street a fire engine’s siren wailed. The shop was going up like a home run. Bonnie kissed her again, hungrily, and Marceline grabbed her hips, pulling them as close as possible. Somewhere down the road someone started fireworks screamed up into the night sky.

The fire had spread even to Marceline’s chest. It was dream of purple and yellow and gold and kissing the prettiest girl in the world. She never wanted to wake up. Moments like this, Marceline decided, were the reason she was even alive.

‘Look,’ Bonnie said breathlessly, resting her head against Marceline’s shoulder. They held each other tight. She would never miss the space between them.

They looked at the crowd of people gathered in the street. All of them were staring up at the burning building. Groups of friends, parents with children, strangers side by side. They all had one thing in common.

No one was wearing any jeans.

Bonnie couldn’t believe she’d lived the last four years without Marceline Abadeer. It was like marvelling at a huge tower of playing cards, wondering how it was at all possible it ever stood up at all.

They were walking down a back street together, away from the thrill and excitement as the townspeople celebrated the downfall of the Denim Boys. Like a drunk, she could barely walk in a straight line. Marceline held her hand, as wobbly as she was, giggling the sweet giggle she used to always use for her. In the back of her mind Bonnie wondered if she’d ever used it for anyone else.

The half-vacant town was not so dark or scary with Marceline there. Halfway back to the car Marceline had started dancing ridiculously, roping Bonnie in, singing one of the Buddy Holly songs from the dance hall badly-on-purpose. And every time Bonnie half-seriously complained she’d kiss her playfully on the neck and Bonnie’s skin would cover itself with lightning leaving her with no breath or reason left for complaints. She was completely unable to stop herself from turning around and kissing Marceline again and again without it ever getting old. She couldn’t believe how happy she was. How happy they were together.

That was, until they got back to the parking space.

She let go of Marceline’s hand.

The space was empty.

‘What the fuck?’ Marceline whispered. The harmony of her voice had become derelict with anxiety. They stood at the brink of a pool of light cast by a lamppost like a makeshift spotlight, staring at the empty space. All of their stuff was in their car, bar some change and their phones. Grandad Chad was in there, all her clothes including the t-shirt Marceline had given her years ago that she’d sheepishly kept, and all the money her parents had given her to get to Butterscotch Bay. Bonnie couldn’t fight off the exponential increase of her panic. 

In the middle of the space someone had left a plastic cow figurine on top of a sealed envelope. With a dead weight settling in her stomach like a wrecked ship plummeting below black sea, Bonnie stepped forwards into the light to pick them both up. The cow, small enough to stand on the palm of her hand, had eyeliner drawn on it in biro. She tossed it to Marceline and tore the envelope open with her index finger, the terrible feeling inside her only sinking deeper and deeper.

‘Wait!’ Marceline shouted, seeing the cow, ‘don’t read it!’

She leapt forwards to snatch the note from Bonnie’s hand. It was too late. It was way, way too late.

_Dear Scumbag Abadeer,_

_We’ve taken back Hank Handsome’s bass. I knew you wouldn’t have left it in your apartment—and we double-checked, don’t worry—so I assumed it was in your car. Not enough time, though to search your car, so we cut our losses and just took the whole thing. I hope you weren’t needing it, though I got the impression you weren’t considering it wasn’t even insured, so consider it a favour out of the kindness of my heart. We got the plate after that little encounter at the ice rink. I hope you weren’t stupid enough to think you’d evaded us completely, let alone entertain the thought that we’d allow you to slip through our fingers._

_Now that the bass is with us, The Missed Takes, its rightful owners, you can head on home. I’d like to say “see you soon” or maybe “have a nice summer” but I don’t mean either of those things. I hope I never see you again, and that your summer stinks like buttholes and burnt onions. Come near me and Hank Handsome’s bass and I’ll burn your car and throw it into the ocean._

_With the upmost disregard,_

_The King and The Missed Takes._

_P.S: You and that girl from the ice rink make a cute couple. I hope it works out for you guys._

Bonnie stared at the letter, reading it through twice more. Marceline stood on the curb pulling at her own hair. Bonnie passed her the note. The whole thing just screamed Marceline, as pure as paint fresh out of the can. The massive clusterfuck, the bass guitar, the stupid names, the stupid lie, the running away. It had Marceline’s name scrawled all over it like an avant-garde tattoo. Bonnie couldn’t have felt more stupid.

‘I can… I can explain, Bon,’ she stammered.

‘Explaining isn’t going to get my _grandad’s fucking ashes back_ ,’ Bonnie seethed. She was so angry her body felt like a suit of armour too small, restricting her every moment, holding her together instead of letting her explode. The night was no longer warm, the rising smoke no longer amazed her. It was cold, and filthy, and her throat was sore.

She knew the second her anger wore out she’d cry like a baby.

‘You don’t have car insurance?’

‘What’s car insurance?’

They could argue about that later.

‘You stole a bass guitar?’

‘It’s not just any bass guitar.’ Marceline tried to laugh to release the tension that had turned the air into needles, but it was too forced and too nervous to do anything except make things worse. ‘Also it technically belongs to me. They stole it first, I stole it second, so it cancels out, right? These guys are just bonkers assholes with bad tempo.’

‘Was this the whole reason for this stupid trip?’

Marceline bit her tongue, silent. That meant yes.

‘You were running away. Oh my God, and I didn’t even notice because I was fucking _falling for you again_.’ She’d let herself be vulnerable in front of Marceline and she’d been fucking her over right from the start. Not in a fun way either. It all felt so familiar, nostalgic, almost; suddenly, she was eighteen again. She was older now, smarter maybe, but it didn’t make losing things any easier. ‘You were being _chased_ and you let me come with you, with my grandad’s ashes, and you didn’t think to tell me: “Hey, Bonnie, I’m running away from some _bonkers assholes with bad tempo_ that will happily threaten to _burn my car_ , are you sure you want to come with me?”’

Bonnie wanted to cry at how much Marceline looked like a kicked puppy. ‘You were falling for me again?’

_Isn’t it obvious?_ Was what she wanted to say. Instead, with as much bitterness as she could manage, Bonnie said: ‘Not anymore.’ She didn’t even mean it. She just wanted it to hurt. In response Marceline did a 180 like a figure skater with fireworks strapped to their skates. The kicked puppy grew up into one furious guard dog.

‘Are you still fucking mad at me from before?’

‘What?’ Bonnie asked incredulously.

‘Don’t be like that, Bonnie. You know what I mean.’

This time it was Bonnie’s turn to bite her tongue. Marceline was right. It had been this long and she still hadn’t dealt with it. _They_ hadn’t dealt with it. The same ancient argument playing out over and over again in her memory to the point the words became blank and all Bonnie remembered was how it felt to have her heart thrown under the wheels of the train from _The Polar Express_ then mangled back together with glue, incorrectly, like forcing together puzzle pieces that didn’t fit _._ Then she was on her own and there’d been silence, real silence, like the silence at the end of the movie when everyone else has left and the credits have stopped rolling and the lights haven’t come up yet, and she couldn’t get rid of the feeling that something was missing. That the story was incomplete; no loaded gun, no happy ending. She remembered walking into the theatre; the exact day, the exact time, the exact feeling when everything had collapsed in on itself. Everything else was a blur.

‘Of course I’m still angry at you. You broke my heart and you disappeared,’ Bonnie said, trying to think straight as their short-sighted drama played out over the empty parking space.

‘Oh, so Bonnie’s the only one with a broken heart, and it’s all my fault!’ Bonnie noted the present tense. ‘You were shutting me out before we even broke up. It was always work this, work that. _Not right now, Marcy. Later, Marcy, I’m busy, go away_.’

‘You couldn’t have just expected me to put my whole life on hold for you! We were basically kids!’

‘I never did! I’d never do that to you! But you know what it was like for me. I’d been left behind by pretty much everyone I was close to. I just hoped that you’d be different.’

‘Well, I guess you shouldn’t have hoped,’ Bonnie said. She stared at the ground like someone had taped the outline of a dead body on the tarmac. ‘Just look at us now.’

Marceline sighed. ‘I guess we haven’t changed.’ She was looking at the plastic cow figurine. She was gripping it so tightly that her knuckles were white. ‘Just going around and around.’

‘No,’ Bonnie agreed, ‘I guess we haven’t.’ She took a long, deep breath, the fumes of the burning building rich in the air. How come this all hurt so much when she’d known it would happen? Not that knowing anything has to die makes the grief any better. She felt tears well up in her eyes and told herself it was just the smoke on the wind. ‘What are we going to do?’ 

Marceline shook her head. They were back to square one. Bonnie may as well have just hit her with a church door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SIKE


	7. Burgers, the Minimum Wage, and Getting Fired

Marceline sat across from Bonnie on cheap vinyl seats at the window of a McDonalds. She sipped shitty coffee that tasted like mud and unpopped popcorn kernels whilst staring out the window at the Burger King across the road, the two establishments eyeing each other down like the Montagues and the Capulets. Bonnie was looking over a bus timetable and a map she had bought with change from the scummy-looking information centre on the way into the service station complex. Marceline got the message—she had gotten used to decoding Bonnie when she could not bring herself to say the words out loud. She was going home. Alone.

‘I still don’t get why you didn’t just tell me about the bass,’ Bonnie hissed to the table.

‘You would have freaked out,’ Marceline replied.

‘No I wouldn’t have.’

‘Yeah, you would,’ Marceline told her, thinking about the viscous loop they’d caught themselves in like horses running in hamster wheels. ‘You wouldn’t have come with me.’

‘I didn’t realise you wanted me to come with you at all,’ Bonnie said. Marceline was stumped. It hadn’t even occurred to her. Bonnie had been an inconvenience for only a spilt second. Past that she’d wanted her company. She’d missed her.

Apparently just as uncomfortable as Marceline, Bonnie changed the subject. ‘So these guys, The Missed Takes or whatever, they were the band playing at the football match?’ she asked. 

‘Yeah, you saw them. They sucked.’

‘And you don’t even know what kind of car they can drive. You don’t have any way to contact them,’ Bonnie repeated. Marceline could only shake her head in defeat. In front of her lay her phone. The calls to The Missed Takes’ manager had all gone straight to voicemail.

You could say that things might not have been going well. Marceline had lost the car she loved, and that heavenly, heavenly bass guitar that King didn’t deserve to stick his grubby hands all over, and had been stuck lying awake all night thinking about the most recent edition of unresolved relationship problems. To make pretty much everything worse, Bonnie’s mood was like hail on an overcast day in winter that cut into your skin. This was a fun new low for both of them. Rock-fucking-bottom. They could make movies, she though. The first would a cult-hit with cynics and queer kids: _Marcy and Bonnie Fuck Up._ Then the much awaited sequel: _Marcy and Bonnie Fuck Up Two: Fucking it up again_. They’d plan a third one but it would get canned before production began because the two leads hated each other’s guts. Marceline drummed her fingers against her coffee cup trying to think of a catchier title. If they were going to drag out all this angst and bullshit, they may as well make money out of it.

She breathed out carefully, well aware any minor crack on their thin-ice relationship could set Bonnie off. ‘I think we need to talk about… stuff, you know,’ she said softly, reaching for Bonnie’s hand. Bonnie shifted away.

‘I don’t feel like talking,’ Bonnie replied, shutting herself off again. Marceline, despite her efforts, despite finally pulling together courage to say something worthwhile, had been locked out. It felt uncomfortably familiar.

It was seven o’clock in the morning. Apart from a few commuters and a few truck drivers who came and went, they were the only people there and it could have only been more depressing if they were sitting wrongly accused on death row. Neither of them had much money. A hotel in the last town let them stay overnight and stuffed them with breakfast as a thank-you for releasing them from the Denim Boys’ curse. They’d caught a ride bright and early with a few teenagers going to the city for the day and got dropped off at the service station. They needed a job. Whilst they paid barely anything, McDonalds and Burger King were hiring, and they had at silently agreed on not wanting to work at Burger King. If Marceline was going to be a cog in a fast-food corporation’s capitalist machine for a week, it wasn’t going to be at Burger King.

The manager, a woman barely five-feet tall but with all the fury of a jet plane on cocaine, emerged from her similarly miniature office with a few pieces of paper and a pen in hand.

‘Oh, so you know each other,’ the manager said. Tracey, Marceline was sort of sure her name was.

‘Yep,’ Bonnie said dryly. 

There was no further ceremony. ‘Congratulations, Miss Abadeer,’ Tracey droned, ‘you’ve got the job.’ Then she turned her head very slightly to Bonnie and said, without a change in tone: ‘Commiserations, Miss Butlers, you didn’t meet our standards for this position. We thank you for your time.’

‘Why not?’ Bonnie asked, as indignant as ever. Always dissecting everything. Marceline wish she’d learn the whole world wasn’t there to be explained away.

‘You’re over-qualified. It would disrupt the balance of our team.’ Tracey turned back to Marceline. ‘You can start today. Your uniform is in the back, ask James where to find it. You’ll work from eight until five, with half an hour for lunch at one, and three free bathroom breaks. Any more and we take it out of your wages.’

‘Fantastic,’ Marceline said, already feeling like shit. Having got Marceline to sign some pieces of paper that probably gave them possession of her soul and handing them back their CVs, Tracey turned around to return to her office.

‘Over-qualified my ass,’ Bonnie complained. ‘She basically called you stupid, you know.’ Her tone had all the hatred of fire and brimstone, and yet Marceline felt a brightness punch through her chest; Bonnie finally looked at her.

‘She called you unemployed,’ Marceline replied. 

‘Whatever,’ Bonnie muttered, seizing her CV and standing up. ‘I’ll go somewhere else.’

‘Meet me back here at five, okay?’ Marceline called after her. Bonnie stormed out of the McDonalds without another word.

Working was like hell. It would have been easy just call her Dad and ask for more money, but Marceline was too stubborn and too proud to go asking for favours from that smug prick anymore. So she put up with it, loitering as much as she could between getting yelled at either by Tracey or by a customer who made up some ridiculous order that wasn’t even on the menu, and craving a cigarette the whole time. She’d smoked her last two the night before, and now really wasn’t the time to be wasting money. Self-destruction could wait. Besides, with all the bad going on, it was high time she did something at least a little bit good.

Bonnie didn’t leave her mind. She’d stormed out of the front door to walk circles in her head all morning, talking endlessly about how useless Marceline was, how much trouble she’d caused, how she never thought things through. Annoyingly enough, Marceline still missed her. But the loneliness was only one sad patty in the triple-decker hamburger. Number two was the remorse of dragging her into this mess in the first place, and then there was number three: kissing her last night. Marceline felt like she should be guilty, but she wasn’t guilty about that at all, even tarnished as it was by the memory that made her want to tear her own heart out: _I was fucking falling for you again._ Past tense. The carved spot Bonnie had made inside Marceline’s body was vacant once more and bleeding like a broken nose.

At her lunch break Marceline decided she’d go over to Burger King to get away from Tracey and the hell that McDonalds had quickly become. And who else did she find at the till other than Bonnibel Butlers.

‘So you did get a job,’ Marceline said, ‘congrats.’

‘What do you want?’ Bonnie demanded, not making eye contact again.

‘Hey, Butlers! Attitude!’ yelled the manager, walking past her and slapping her on the shoulder. Bonnie flinched.

‘I don’t care. Fries and the cheapest sandwich you do,’ Marceline said, sick of the smell of oil already. God, this was awkward. More awkward than the time Bonnie’s Dad had caught them making out in their living room because he got home early from work for once. Marceline had already been sleeping over for about a year and Mr Butlers, oblivious, hadn’t thought twice about it. Bonnie pressed some buttons on the register and Marceline fished out the right change from her pockets. Doing her best not to fumble her words, she said: ‘You know, I really think we should talk about it.’

‘We don’t have anything to talk about,’ Bonnie spat with excessive venom. She was good at that, Marceline thought. Good at knowing how to make it hurt.

‘Hey, Romeo! Quit talking! There are other people in here!’ barked a woman in line with Karen haircut.

Marceline grabbed the paper bag one of the other employees dumped on the counter. ‘Never mind,’ she said, and sulked away.

She ate lunch sat on a kerb, wishing she had bought a bottle of water to wash down a burger like warm pebbles and fries salty enough to dry up the ocean. It was when she was about to stuff the empty cardboard containers into an already overfull bin that she saw a white van pull up, the back doors covered in mud and finger prints, driven by none other than Hierophant himself.

Hierophant didn’t spot her. The ill-fitting McDonalds uniform probably helped. He drove right on past, classical music leaking out from the speakers, and into the drive-through lane for Burger King. A wet uncle like that, Marceline thought, of course he’d go to Burger King.

After ten minutes, Hierophant’s van drove around into the car park and stopped there. Then he got out and went inside the service station, his back to Marceline. She checked the time on her phone; she was already late back for her shift. She didn’t care.

Marceline crossed the half-empty car park as casually and as quickly as she could manage, the strong stench of urine in the warm July sun making her want to regurgitate her lunch. Hierophant had left the window open. Having checked the coast was clear both ways, she reached through the open gap and unlocked the van. 

She was well aware of how wrong this looked. How undefendable it would be if anyone caught her. But she wasted no time in searching the glove compartment, the shelves in the door, the crap on the passenger seat—finding nothing—until she opened up the back of the van. It occurred to her that she could hide out in it until Hierophant, hopefully, drove her back to whatever dodgy motel they were hiding out in.

What would Bonnie say? Marceline thought. She’d say she was being careless. You get to their hideout, great, but what next? They lock you in the van? You fall right into their hands? Marceline knew King wasn’t messing around with his threats and Marceline was pretty attached to that damn car. The Missed Takes were pathetic musicians and in general sad excuses for human beings but weren’t to be underestimated when it came to violence and extortion. Marceline didn’t want to know what King had done to get his hands on the bass in the first place. No, said the Bonnie in her brain, she couldn’t hide in the back of the van.

There was nothing there, apart from an empty jar and more beef jerky than seemed necessary in any situation. Marceline swore, looking in every corner and crevice, but still there was nothing that could lead them back to the bass and grandad Chad’s ashes.

‘What are you doing?’ Bonnie whispered.

‘ _Holy fucking shit!’_ Marceline jumped so hard she almost hit the van’s ceiling. ‘Don’t creep up on me like that!’

‘Jesus Christ, get out of there, before—,’

‘Before what, young lady?’ It was Hierophant. She recognised the wet, soppy drip of his voice immediately. Marceline felt like slamming her face into the floor. Bonnie’s hatred for her had just deepened by another degree. Great.

Marceline stepped out of the van. ‘What is it?’

‘Well, you seem to have broken into my van,’ Hierophant leered. It was a hot day and getting hotter, but he had not removed his black hunting boots nor his thick leather coat, making him sweat profusely. His hair was combed back. He smelt like whiskey and old people.

‘Oh shit, this is _your_ van?’ Marceline said, scratching her head, ‘that explains so much. I thought this was my van. That explains where all my stuff has gone. I was worried for a minute that someone had stolen it all and left me a threatening note.’

‘You know this creep?’ Bonnie asked. 

‘I see you’re doing well for yourselves,’ Hierophant said, ignoring her. ‘Finally getting a real job, hey, Marceline? Contributing to society?’

‘More than some lame old fart in a tribute band that can barely play the drums,’ Marceline shot back. Hierophant grabbed her by the collar.

‘I haven’t forgotten you pushed me off that Zamboni,’ he leered, breathing his rotting-carcass breath into Marceline’s face. ‘I’ve still got bruises. You should be careful, getting in our way—,’

‘Get off of her!’ Bonnie barked. She slapped Hierophant’s arm and he lost his grip on Marceline’s collar. Marceline looked at her, bewildered, and kind of turned on.

‘Hierophant? Is that you?’ All three of them turned to see the Burger King manager jog wonkily over to them. ‘Butlers? What are you doing out here?’

‘Travis!’ Hierophant grinned, ‘fancy seeing you here!’

‘Are they causing you trouble?’

‘As a matter of fact, I just caught your employee here breaking into my van.’

‘Miss Butlers, is this true?’ Travis hissed.

‘No I didn’t! It was Marceline!’ Bonnie blurted even before Marceline could incriminate herself.

‘Fraternising with the enemy?’ He waved a finger at Marceline. ‘Breaking into a customer’s vehicle? Miss Butlers, I think you’ve broken the record for the fastest time to get fired,’ Travis said, patting Hierophant on the shoulder like they were old chums. Hierophant couldn’t have looked more repulsed by him if he’d tried.

‘But… but what about her?’ Bonnie muttered, pointing an accusatory finger at Marceline.

‘I’m not her manager. Go hand your uniform back in,’ Travis said. Hierophant had a gloating smile plastered across his face.

‘See you around, Abadeer,’ he said, and got back into his van.

Bonnie had already turned around and began to sulk back off to Burger King. Marceline called after her, but she did not look back. That was enough to tell Marceline that Bonnie was crying.

Tracey yelled at her for being late. Marceline tuned it out and went to take her place at the second window on the drive through. A few people came and went, taking their food without so much as a thank you. The fifth car that pulled through was a group of teenagers.

‘Holy shit, are you Marceline Abadeer?’ asked the driver.

Of all the times to get recognised, Marceline thought, it had to be now.

‘Who?’ she asked as convincingly as possible.

‘Marceline Abadeer, from Marceline and the Scream Queens. You know, half-demon, half-vampire, half-God?’ Nice, Marceline thought, she hadn’t heard that one before.

‘Dude, if she’s Marceline Abadeer, why the fuck would she be working at McDonalds?’ sneered the passenger. The driver looked at her expectantly.

‘Sorry, kid, I don’t know who that is.’

The kid in the back leaned forward to peer at her properly. ‘Yeah man, Marceline Abadeer’s like, hotter, you know? No offence.’

‘None taken,’ Marceline said, not sure that she even could take offence in this situation.

The car behind honked at them to get a move on.

‘You do really look like her,’ said the driver. ‘Are you her twin or something?’

‘I think I’d know if I had a famous twin.’

‘Yeah, I guess so,’ said the driver. Then they drove away.

Her shift dragged on like a Charles Dickens novel. At some point just before eight, Tracey started to scream at some sixteen-year-old who’d spilt hot oil everywhere, and Marceline chose to take advantage of her final remaining bathroom break. She snuck unnoticed into the toilets, affronted by the smell of disinfectant, locked herself into a cubicle and sat with her feet up on the shut seat so that no one saw her shoes and caught her in there. Though she was beginning to suspect Tracey could smell blood from twenty miles away.

She pulled her phone out from her back pocket. About time she made the effort to call him, she thought and went through her contacts to find Simon’s name. Even if things were shit, maybe he’d manage to make her feel better.

Simon picked up on the sixth ring.

‘Hello? Who… who is this?’ He still had an old landline that didn’t show caller ID.

‘Hey, Simon, it’s Marcy. Did I call at a bad time?’

‘No, no, no. Gunther! Gunther, get off the table!’ Simon yelled. Marceline managed a smile to herself. ‘Sorry about that. What’s up, Marcy? What’s cooking in Marcy-Town?’

‘What’s _not_ cooking in Marcy-Town,’ Marceline groaned. ‘I’m pretty boned, to be honest.’

‘What, you got a boyfriend then?’

‘No! Not that kind of boned. Boned like, doing bad, you know?’

‘I see… I see…’

‘Anyway, it’s no big deal, really, nothing to worry too hard about at all, but I ran out of cash and my car got stolen. It was those dong-heads The Missed Takes. You know, King…’ Marceline trailed off. If Simon had a memory of Empress, it wasn’t a good one. 

‘Those poop-noggins. Bunch of hacks if you ask me. Hacks! Couldn’t get by playing like that in my day. All they do is pee all over my old band’s name. Robert’s dead, for heaven’s sake, can’t they let him rest in peace?’

Marceline narrowed her eyes at the linoleum floor, connecting the wires in her head. ‘Woah-woah-woah, your old band? Simon, were you in The Stakes?’ What she was really wondering was if this was another of his crazy-old-man things. It was hard to read him over the phone.

‘Oh, yeah! I was the best drummer out there! Simon Sexy they called me. Ladies couldn’t get enough,’ he said.

‘Ew, gross!’ Marceline laughed, still in disbelief. Had she been raised by the legendary drummer of the greatest band of all time? ‘What happened?’

‘Oh, you know, it wasn’t for me anymore. Robert died and they buried him in secret. It was only me, George, Hank, and his mother attended the funeral. He asked to be buried with his guitar, you know. Kind of weird when you think about it.’

In the hallway, Marceline could still hear Tracey yelling at the top of her lungs. She’d make a good fire alarm.

So Bobby Beautiful’s real guitar was in his grave, clutched by cold fingers. Then Marceline had an idea. ‘Did you ever tour anywhere near Jeansville?’

‘Oh, gosh, it was such a long time ago. Why?’

‘I don’t know, I was thinking of places to stay, and I was wondering if you knew anywhere good,’ she said as nonchalantly as she could.

Simon laughed from the other side of the phone. ‘Only crummy old hotels. I remember one where George danced with the owner’s wife in this crusty old bar whilst the guy watched. A fight broke out after. I imagine it’s what the Copacabana was like. Ooh! I remember! The Three Seasons it was called. I forget the owner’s name but his wife—whew! His wife was something else!’

Marceline wasn’t far off screaming with joy. She finally had a lead. A chance to make it up to Bonnie. It made sense, too; if The Missed Takes would hide out anywhere, she knew King would pick somewhere The Stakes had stayed like it was hallowed ground.

The restroom door slammed open. ‘Abadeer, get out here and mop the floor!’ Tracey howled.

‘Simon, I’ve got to go. I’ll call you soon,’ Marceline said, with just as much intention to mop a floor as a pig who’d just eaten three Christmas dinners and fifty pounds of lead had on floating.

‘Bye, Marcy. Love you. Don’t get into trouble!’

It was way too late for that. ‘I won’t. Love you too.’

Bonnie felt like shit. She felt like the last pack of sugar on the shelf at the store—leaking everywhere, unwanted, alone. She sat on the kerbside in the warmth of the sun just far enough away from the bin so she couldn’t smell the rot and just far enough away from either the Burger King or the McDonalds not to have to smell the exhaust of grease and fuel they pumped out at all times. From a few hundred yards away came the roar of the main road like the crash of a gasoline ocean. Twice she saw Marceline go outside with a black bin bag over her shoulder, and both times she was adamant not to look at her. Bonnie didn’t want to give her any illusions that she might forgive her. She had vowed to herself that she wouldn’t. If she gave her the chance, Marceline’s big, sad eyes would rip right through her in a minute. This was the punishment for both of them for being stupid enough to think it could have worked out. Maybe that was cruel. Bonnie was beyond caring.

So this was what failure feels like, she thought to herself. She’d lost Grandad Chad and she had no idea how she was going to tell her parents. She’d lost her stupid, stupid job that even semi-literate teenagers could keep and she’d lost it faster than Romeo and Juliet fell in love. Though that was Marceline’s fault. It was _all_ Marceline’s fault, and she’d keep telling herself that. Having someone to blame made the ultra-super-mega-combo-punch of disappointment easier to cope with.

Like a lost dog without a collar, she had nowhere to go and no way to get home. She was wracking her brain for ideas; what would Marceline do? Marceline wouldn’t be worrying about it, she decided, Marceline was focussed on the moment she lived in. She always was. Bonnie had always liked that about her. That she was creative, and funny, and did brave, stupid things before thinking twice about them. But that also meant Marceline never took the time to try and explain the insane world around her. Bonnie used to dream of seeing the world through her eyes but now could think of nothing to give her a headache faster. Funny, the way things play out sometimes.

She caught herself smiling and cut it out. Footsteps were approaching her through the now-empty car park. The sun was getting low, and shadows were getting long, and the filthy service station complex covered in concrete and loose garbage was drenched in golden sunlight. Bonnie imagined it was what pouring hundred-year-old wine into a Monster Energy can would feel like. McDonalds and Burger King still glowered at each other like warring houses. Before she knew it Marceline stood in front of her, hands on her hips, her McDonalds t-shirt tucked into her back pocket.

‘We need to talk,’ Marceline said. This again, Bonnie thought. What was there to talk about? They were both messed up, both tired, and both out of options. If neither of them had changed, what good could they do? There was no bridging the rift that had formed between them. Marceline had been talking to her with the door on a chain, and Bonnie was just about ready to bolt it shut once and for all.

‘I’ve already told you I don’t feel like it,’ Bonnie replied.

‘Yeah, yeah, whatever. Look, Bon, I know I hurt you. I know I fucked up. And don’t try and make excuses because you know you fucked up too, and I’m definitely still mad about it. But that’s… that’s all happened already. I’m sorry I got so angry last night, it was because what you said to me _hurt_ and I know you wanted it to. So yes, I’m sorry, but I’m also not going to sit around on my butt feeling guilty for the rest of time. I wish I could go back and do things differently, but I can’t. The only thing I can do is to try to make it up to you. I care about you, Bonnie. I care about you more than I think you know. Kissing you last night was just…’ Marceline trailed off, at a loss for words. Bonnie knew what she meant. Some feelings were too great to contain within the cages of words. Like trying to replicate the feeling of a simultaneous triple cosmic orgasm when you’re stuck with just having one. ‘Kissing you was everything I wanted. And more. Kick me if I’m wrong but I kind of get the feeling that you thought so too.’ Bonnie bit her cheek to keep a smile off her face. ‘Anyway, um, basically, I’m asking permission for you to let me try. Try and make it up to you, that is. And once I’ve made it up to you we’ll figure shit out from there. I can’t make any promises about the future, but I know I want you in it. Even as friends. But if you… if you don’t want any of that, I’ll turn around and go away forever. Just like last time. If… if that’s what you really want.’

Bonnie stared down at the tarmac. A choice. Which one would fuel the flaming, spinning wheel of flirting and post-teenaged angst they were stuck on, and which one would bulldoze it in half once and for all? Really, there was no way to tell. But Bonnie’s mother had a story she liked to tell about starving mules trying to choose between identical dinners. 

‘Do you have a plan?’ she asked, finally looking into Marceline’s eyes. She had rarely seen her so focussed before. For the first time her view wasn’t impeded by the memory of the angry teenager she’d met and haplessly fallen in love with, barely aware of what that even meant. She could see Marceline clearly. She was honest, and certain, and brave enough to vulnerable. Bonnie was surprised. No—more than surprised. Sitting on the kerb at some grubby service station far, far away from home, she looked up and she was proud of her. ‘Do you have a plan to make it up to me? We don’t even have a car. How do we get anywhere?’

‘I have an idea,’ Marceline said, a familiar smirk crossing her face, ‘but you are _so_ not going to like it.’


	8. Abandoned Hotels, Shitty Ex-Boyfriends, and Totally Unfair Sword Fighting

The three of them sat squashed in the front seat of the pickup truck. That was, of course, Marceline, Bonnie, and Ash. Marceline was sandwiched in the middle seat with her mouth clamped shut. When Bonnie had been told that she wasn’t to like the plan, she didn’t think she was going to dislike it this much. Whether she was happy about her feelings for Marceline or not, the thought of her being with anyone else made her cringe, and it didn’t help that Ash was easily winning the award for the biggest pile of walking, talking, (barely) sentient shit in the world. It was a two hour drive, but Ash managed to make it feel like the worst four-hour lecture from a misogynist she’d ever had to listen to—and she was in STEM, so she’d had to listen to a few. Why Marceline had ever dated him was completely beyond her.

Ash drove even worse than Marceline did. They were going through a ghostly suburb, the houses shut up and the streetlamps off even though it was dark. Ash was listening to Good Charlotte and talking about all the girls who’d apparently thrown themselves at him recently, as well as his allegedly excellent career as a magician. Bonnie was fairly certain he was trying to make Marceline jealous; he appeared to be convinced that her asking for his help was some kind of indication that they would get back together. Bonnie would have loved to break the news clean in two right over his stupid head, but he might have dumped them on the side of the road, miles away from anyone, and they’d be back at square one. So she saved it for later.

The Three Seasons Hotel had been abandoned for more than twenty years. Destroyed by a fire in the nineties and with the local economy going downhill, no one had even thought to save it. It was a crumbling shell of a building surrounded by empty houses and patches of wasteland, car parks with the concrete all torn up like a teenager’s face, and trees that were setting off Ash’s allergies. They parked two blocks away.

Though dilapidated, the hotel was huge. Bigger than Bonnie had imagined. Tall and wide, with a with what looked like a bunch of garages around to the side, the other half mostly burnt out; probably where the fire had started. The Chevrolet was nowhere to be seen. It looked like, maybe half a century ago, it might not have been such a _crummy old hotel_ or whatever it was that Marceline had said. It had all been explained in a rambling speech about Simon and several decades of lore on The Stakes (or did she mean The Steaks? At this point she was too embarrassed to ask), a band Bonnie had previously never heard of. Despite Marceline’s passion for the subject, to Bonnie all the information had become gloopy and grey.

‘Okay, so, I’m pretty sure they’re here,’ Marceline began, ‘Ash, you go with Bonnie too look for the Chevrolet. If our stuff isn’t there, Ash waits with the car and Bonnie goes looking. I’m going after Hank Handsome’s bass. If anything goes wrong, well… let’s just hope that it doesn’t. We’ll be quick, and no one will see us. Got it?’ The question was pointed at Ash. 

‘Yeah, babe, no problem. Me and Betty have it all figured out,’ Ash said, throwing an arm around Bonnie who suddenly, by no correlation, had the urge to vomit.

‘Bonnie,’ she corrected him.

‘Yeah, that’s what I said.’

Marceline forced out a long, excruciated sigh, and handed Bonnie the car keys. ‘Whatever. If you see any of The Missed Takes, make a run for it. It’s not worth fighting with these creeps.’ Bonnie nodded. She felt like sinking into the ground. Her mind was churning out things to get anxious over like Henry Ford churned out T Models in the twenties, just with less sympathy for the Nazis. What if they had the wrong place? What if she couldn’t find Grandad Chad? What if they couldn’t find the car? What if all their stuff was gone? What if they got Marceline? What if Marceline got hurt, and no one could find her? As much as she wanted to blindly trust her, the perpetually grovelling pragmatist at the back of her mind had recently bought a megaphone and she hadn’t had peace and quiet in days.

They were going separate ways at the next block, Marceline towards the back of the hotel, Bonnie towards the garages. She didn’t like the idea of splitting up. It raised the chances that Bonnie might find Grandad Chad and Marceline might find her dumb magical bass guitar, but it also raised the chances of one of them getting hurt, or lost, or taken on a three-chapter long digression that has something to do with time travel and maybe dinosaurs. Having spent such concentrated amounts of time in each other’s company, it was easy to forget what missing Marceline was like. Because despite all her sarcasm and not-so-subtle flirting and road rage, Bonnie would miss her, and missing her was shittier than a hangover cross-bred with a coyote with diarrhoea just outside of Chernobyl.

‘Hey,’ she called. Marceline stopped in the middle of the road like a really hot traffic warden. ‘Be careful.’

It was dark, but in the faint white light of the waning moon, she could make out Marceline’s smile. ‘You too.’ She turned around again and disappeared. _You too._

Ash finally understood that he should probably shut his fat mouth when they got closer to the hotel. Leaning against the old red brick wall, they peered through the gaps between the spray-painted boards to see nothing. It was dark inside, and had no doubt been looted and lived in by a long and illustrious succession of squatters. Ash led the way around the corner of the building to the row of garage doors, creeping like a cat near the bins behind a restaurant where all the rats hang out. Then he sneezed like a vacuum cleaner in an auditorium.

‘Oh, bunk,’ Ash sniffled, wiping snot off his nose like a toddler. There was a white van on the driveway. Bonnie checked it was empty before she got a torch out and checked the plate. It was Hierophant’s.

‘We’re in the right place,’ she said, and stepped back to look at the doors. Above them were more windows—easy vantage points. Bonnie made sure they kept behind the cover of the van. She had to be careful. She was going to get Grandad Chad back, but she’d like to do it without getting stabbed.

‘Which door is it?’ Ash asked. Bonnie was thinking about that. The way they were spaced suggested each one was separate from the other. If the Chevrolet were anywhere in there, they would have to check behind every door. Which might be tricky of they were locked. Noisy, too.

Ash raised a feeble fist to punch the first door. ‘Wait!’ Bonnie said, with just enough venom for him to actually listen. She walked down the whole driveway, inspecting the intersection between the walls and the road. She came to the final one. Finger prints in the dirt that had collected on the door. Faint tyre prints. ‘It’s this one.’

Ash broke the hinge on the door like he’d done it before. It swung open. There it was: Marceline’s blue Chevrolet, a fresh dent on the fender. Bonnie shone her torch into the back window. Most of their stuff was still in it, but no urn full of her grandfather’s remains.

‘Marcy still drives this piece of junk, huh?’ Ash leered, kicking the wheel.

‘You drive a rusty pickup that your Dad almost sold for scrap metal,’ Bonnie replied.

‘Yeah, but that’s manly. I’m a man.’ Bonnie didn’t have time to unpack that. ‘That’s why Mar-Mar wants me back so bad. ‘Cause I’m a manly man.’

Bonnie did her best to ignore him. ‘My stuff isn’t here, I’m going to go look for it. Are you going to wait?’

‘Yeah, whatever,’ Ash said. In the darkness he walked into a toolbox, kicking it over, creating a noise that could probably be heard by sharks at the bottom of the ocean. Bonnie had very little faith. But at least, she thought, stepping through the door into the hotel, that she wouldn’t have to put up with him and his smell anymore.

Inside the Three Seasons was like the crumbling small intestine of an old wooden cow made that only ate manky carpet and charcoal. A few bare staff corridors that stank like death led her to the main hallway. It was completely dark. Only tiny slices of moonlight made it through the windows to cut up all the blackness. The torch on her phone was barely enough. A white pool of light to illuminate the garbage and debris that had been strewn over the assortment of rugs patchworked across the floor, once brightly coloured, now stained with unidentifiable substances and charred black in patches. The air was stagnant and thick with dust. She found herself covering her face with her shirt in order to breathe.

Bonnie shone her torch up to the left, then to the right. How she’d ever find Grandad Chad was completely beyond her.

No, she thought to herself, it wasn’t. She was being fatalistic, like a kid with sand in their crocs. This floor was abandoned, but if The Missed Takes were here they would have left evidence behind them. They’d been lazy enough to leave the van out on show. She looked up at the ceiling to see a gaping hole into the next floor. Some of the floors weren’t safe. That narrowed down the ones they might choose to squat in, or hide stuff in. It was a process of elimination. But even so, there were almost ten storeys, multiple wings, and that would make the hotel into one huge, nonsense three-dimensional maze burn-out like a college student after two semesters that might never have a solution.

Then it hit her: _the basement._ The only part of such a rickety old building that wouldn’t be falling to pieces. It was logical, in a traditional way, to want to hide out in a basement of all places. 

There was a noise from down the hall. Bonnie almost exploded with fright. Blood whistled in her ears as silence fell again. It must have been a rat, or a stray dog, or a really big spider, or something.

She steeled her fraught nerves. She just had to stay focussed. And she had to get moving. The sooner she could get the hell out of there, the better.

She hoped Marceline would be okay. 

Marceline had her foot stuck in the ceiling between two pipes and her upper body strewn over the arms of a chandelier. Her foot had used to be stick in the floor, but the wood was burnt and rotten; one wrong move and she’d fallen through into the dining room. Or what had used to be the dining room. Her phone had fallen to the ground, face down so that the torch light still reached her and she could see the nautical theme decorations adorning the hall. Slightly ironic, considering they were still a few hundred miles from the sea, and the fire had obviously taken its spicy grip on this wing of the hotel, too.

Anyway, falling wasn’t an option. It would be far enough for her to break something in a bad way. Maybe fifteen feet, judging by the distance of her phone, and she couldn’t hardly see shit.

Come on, she thought to herself, what would Bonnie do? Bonnie would roll her eyes and scoff at her for getting into this situation in the first place, then make some stupid snide comment that Marceline found hot in a very infuriating way.

‘Fuck!’ Marceline whispered. The chain of the chandelier slipped another inch out of the fitting on the ceiling, a shower of dust hitting the floor. Her heart raced like it would make a difference—she still wouldn’t have the core strength to reach up and climb back through the ceiling. The chandelier wasn’t going to hold her weight for much longer.

The door for the dining hall creaked open. Marceline wanted to call out, hoping it was Bonnie, but quickly realised Bonnie was taller than five foot and didn’t walk around abandoned buildings singing scat jazz. No. It was Phil, The Missed Takes maybe-keyboardist.

Marceline held her breath. He came in, walked in a circle as if looking for something with a big, sweeping searchlight of a torch scanning the tacky fish paintings on the wall. He was unbelievably oblivious to the person clinging to the ceiling until the chandelier shifted again and Marceline couldn’t help a small yelp of shock. Phil swivelled and pointed a searchlight at her, blinding her completely.

‘Whatchya doin’, Marceline?’ he sang. His voice echoed up through the cavernous hall. Marceline had her eyes squeezed shut tighter than a smuggler’s coke-filled arsehole.

‘Could you give me a hand, Phil?’ she asked. At least it hadn’t been King, or worse, Moon, who had some kind of bloodlust out for her and whose ideal birthday present would be getting to break every bone in Marceline’s body. Phil didn’t even seem to know what was going on most of the time.

‘What’s in it for me, fruitcake?’

‘Help me first, then we’ll talk,’ Marceline said, feeling the pipes holding her foot in place start to pop and give way.

‘Woah, woah, no need to get all worked up before church,’ Phil said, and left the room. Marceline hung there like a helpless bat, her muscles aching desperately, wishing Bonnie were there to rescue her. Catch her in her arms, kiss her on the cheek.

‘Fuck,’ Marceline said again. Liking people sucked huge ass.

Phil came back through the dining room door, dragging a filthy mattress almost three times his size behind him. With a grunt, he dumped it on the table that was more or less below Marceline.

Well, she thought, there’s no point hanging around.

She twisted her foot. It came free of the pipes. She shrugged herself off the chandelier and fell, unceremoniously, shoulders-first down into the mattress, covering her head with her arms. It smelt like old beer and piss. The table below her collapsed, splintering up through the mattress, barely missing skewering her like a Marceline-kebab. 

A cracking noise came from above. Phil said: ‘Oh!’ Marceline barely rolled off the mattress in time. The rest of the ceiling collapsed in a tumble of broken boards, mouldy insultation, and concrete dust, crummy ‘60s carpet, slamming onto the place she had fallen. Dust kicked up into clouds big enough to start a storm. Once they had settled, Marceline stood up and brushed the worst of it off her. Her shoulder hurt pretty badly, but she could live with it.

‘So, what have you got for me?’ Phil asked, the torch beam trained on her again.

Marceline tripped him over with a swipe at his ankles. He fell backwards, she placed a foot over his chest.

‘Where’s the bass?’ she demanded.

‘What bass?’

‘Don’t play dumb,’ she said, pressing harder on his sternum, ‘or I’ll knock out your last teeth and you’ll be eating mashed potato and angel delight until you die.’

‘Alright, alright!’ he wheezed. ‘Fourth floor, master suite 6. It’s across a big hallway with a glass floor, you can’t miss it.’

‘Who’s here? Who’s guarding it?’

‘Just Empress! I swear. Hierophant went to raid the wine cellar, King and Moon went to get Chinese takeaway. There’s no one else here,’ Phil said. Marceline believed him. It wasn’t in him to lie. Beginning to feel a little guilty, she took her foot off his chest.

‘Sorry, dude. Just… Just get out of here before I change my mind about letting you go,’ she said, picking up his torch to use herself—no more walking over bad floorboards. Phil scurried outside through the fire exit, and Marceline turned around.

Halfway up the stairs in the curling centre of the charred old hotel, a collapsed wall gave her a clear view of the night sky. The surrounded by stars like freckles. It took her breath away, and she thought of Bonnie.

 _Please be alright,_ she thought, _please be alright._

Bonnie’s breath turned to steam in the air before her as she descended into the Three Seasons’ cellar. The light on over the door at the bottom of the stairs told her what she’d hypothesised. Someone was down there.

Fear filled her like cola in a free refill cup at Five Guys. Her fingers were cold as she reached out to touch the doorhandle, but the brass was colder. Slowly, carefully, she pressed it down, feeling the latch click out of its place. Bonnie held her breath. She opened the door.

Before her was a long rectangular room with a low ceiling, wooden wine racks stacked up against either side. Classical music was playing from a record player on the floor. A desk faced the far wall, a man in a fur coat riding boots sitting on a stool, his legs crossed. It was Hierophant. He had not noticed the door opening.

In front of him was Grandad Chad’s urn.

Bonnie didn’t know what do to. Marceline had warned her about The Missed Takes. But she was so close. Come on, she thought, wracking her brain, what would Marceline do?

‘Hey, uh, dillweed!’ Bonnie yelled without thinking. Hierophant almost fell of his stool in surprise.

‘Oh, it’s you! From Burger King!’ he said. ‘I’m terribly sorry about getting you fired. I was only trying to get on Miss Abadeer’s nerves. I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.’

‘Give me back that urn!’ Bonnie ordered. Hierophant stood up, took the urn in his hand, and held it out at arm’s length, threatening to drop it. Now he had an excuse for a monologue. Great, Bonnie thought.

‘So you’re Miss Abadeer’s girlfriend!’ he said enthusiastically, ‘can’t say I approve of your tastes, dear, but who am I to judge?’

Bonnie felt hot blood burn up her throat and creep onto her face. ‘She’s not my—,’

‘Now, then,’ he continued regardless, ‘I apologise for taking your things so cheaply, only leaving you a note rather than doing it in person. That wasn’t my decision to make, unfortunately. And believe me, it was only our intention to inconvenience Miss Abadeer. For any worries we might have brought upon you, I sympathise deeply. However, I cannot return your possessions without a fair contest. We shall settle our dispute the old-fashioned way. Do you agree to this challenge?’

Hierophant threw the urn from one had to the other, then fumbled with it. ‘Yes!’ she cried, about to have a heart attack. He placed Grandad Chad firmly on his desk next to a fountain pen, a stack of manuscript paper, and a silver goblet. 

‘How are you at fencing, Miss…?’

‘Butlers,’ Bonnie replied. ‘Better than most.’ Seven rankings in the top five for national under-sixteens, but she didn’t say that.

‘Well then,’ he said, drawing from his coat a rapier with an ornate handle, and gesturing to the wall next to Bonnie. There was an iron poker hanging on a nail. She gingerly picked it up. It was heavy and too big for her hand. ‘ _En garde_.’

Hierophant leapt towards her, the tip of the blade barely missing Bonnie’s cheek. Bonnie retreated, hurled the door open, and darted up the stairs. She stopped on the final one, looking down on him and parried his stab at her stomach. The poker was badly weighted, nowhere near as deft as Hierophant’s sword. It was a contest she had been set up to lose.

Hierophant advanced. They exchanged a few blows, the clashing of metal on metal echoing like a crying baby on delayed flight throughout the vacant hotel. Bonnie fought back as much as she could, but Hierophant was quick and had no qualms about actually hurting her. She stepped back out of the light, hoping to evade him and listen for his movements in the darkness. Almost blind, she stumbled on a fallen beam and into the path of a slither of moonlight. Hierophant lunged, scoring one long scratch through her shirt and across the skin on her stomach. Bonnie dropped her phone and cried out in pain. She touched her fingers to her stomach. They came away wet. Adrenaline baptising Jesus in her ears, Bonnie forced herself to her feet and ran down a dark hallway. Hierophant found the light switch. Yellow light flooded the old hotel like a candle lit funeral service. They were standing twenty feet apart. A charred black carpet ran the whole way down the corridor, finally stopping at a door that led into the courtyard. Bonnie was gasping for breath.

‘You can’t run for ever. If I don’t get you, this old ruin will.’ He tossed his sword around in his hand, enjoying its weight. ‘With a pretty face like yours, it will be such a shame to skewer you. Do you like souvlaki?’

‘I prefer lamb kleftiko,’ Bonnie spat, and turned to keep running.

Gripping her stomach, she sprinted to the courtyard door. She slammed it shut behind her, relieved for just a moment, surveying the glass ceiling up above, the artificial pond covered in algae and scum in the centre, and the graffiti covering the walls.

Hierophant punched, then kicked, then barrelled his way through the rotten wood.

Steel clashed on iron. For every step forward Bonnie would take, Hierophant would force her two steps back. Bonnie parried as he sliced at her face, locking his sword crossed with the poker, held inches from her eyeballs. The old man was grinning, spit gathering at the corners of his mouth, his eyes wild. At last he pushed her backwards, sending her tumbling into a pile of fallen bricks.

Before Bonnie could haul herself to her feet, he had his rapier levelled at her throat.

‘Looks like I’ve won, Miss Butlers. You should forfeit now before you’re saying hello to your grandfather, rather than goodbye,’ he leered.

Bonnie looked up at the glass above them. Two figures stood on the glass ceiling five floors up, moving their mouths to speak words Bonnie could not hear. Marceline and the woman she had mentioned. It must have been Empress. She saw Marceline take a step back, off the glass, out of view.

Bonnie was all out of options. _Come on, what would Marceline do?_

She looked Hierophant in his sickly yellow eyes. ‘Fuck you,’ she said.

She kicked him straight in the balls.

‘Fourth floor,’ Marceline muttered to herself, sweeping the torch beam across the engraved numbers that had been nailed to the hotel’s charred walls. ‘Suite 6.’

She turned a corner into a lit corridor, and from the woman standing in her way, knew she had come to the right place.

‘Hello, Marceline. I thought I could smell a rat,’ Empress said, her thin lips cracked and spraying spit everywhere like a snake with too much saliva. She was dressed in a long, purple robe with a bandana covering most of her wispy greying hair that didn’t quite match the gown. And, of course, she was still wearing her sunglasses with the horn frames. Probably why it was so bright in there.

‘Hello, Empress, I thought I could smell a manipulative goat around the corner,’ Marceline replied.

‘I found your old boy-toy. Caught him in one of the animal traps on the second floor. Told me you were coming.’

Marceline rolled her eyes. ‘You can keep him.’

Empress laughed a sickening laugh, like a giant crow getting hit by a miniature jet plane. ‘You haven’t changed.’

‘If by that you mean I’m still a sexy piece of ass then I’d have to ask you to get real. You’re not wrong, but you’re too old for me. We’ve talked about this.’

‘If only you ever shut up. It would have put everyone else in your life out of their misery. Where’s that girl who’s following you around? Hasn’t she left you yet?’

‘That’s none of your business.’ Marceline had lost Bonnie once, she was trying not to think about losing her again. Though if she wanted to leave there was no way to stop her.

‘Everyone will leave you eventually, I wouldn’t get too het up about it. I hear even Simon’s starting to lose his marbles! It was always going to happen.’

Marceline felt the poorly-disguised bottomless pit in her stomach open back up.

‘Cut it out.’ She knew what Empress was like. It was like throwing chips onto a beach to get swarmed at by seagulls. In this metaphor, Marceline was the chips.

‘Oh, look! There she is,’ Empress said, peering down at the glass floor they stood on. Marceline looked down, brushing the dust away with her foot, she could see Hierophant and Bonnie clashing metal together, throwing sparks across the manky courtyard.

‘No…’ Marceline muttered. Hierophant pinned Bonnie to the ground with a sword pointed at her neck. ‘No!’

‘Oh, the bass is in the room right behind me, by the way. King was keen on having the same room The Stakes did when they stayed here,’ Empress said all too casually.

‘Why are you telling me that?’

‘Well, you must have already known it!’ she laughed. It was a sound like a car alarm. ‘Plus, I thought I’d let you know how close you came to winning right before I shoot you.’

Empress pulled out from her robe a small revolver. Marceline’s heart stopped. She carefully stepped back off the glass, afraid a single incorrect movement would send a piece of lead through her forehead. She was completely stumped. _Come on,_ she thought, _what would Bonnie do?_

Seeing her terror, Empress said: ‘Oh, don’t be silly! I won’t kill you. I’ll just shoot you in the leg. Can’t say what will happen to you or your girlfriend after that. King can decide your fate when he gets back.’

Marceline stood with her feet frozen over the carpet. Bonnie would use her big brain to figure out her chances of Empress missing her when she ran for it, or how to dodge bullets like in _The Matrix_. No, that was wrong… the answer was always deceptively simple, always right beneath her nose…

Marceline looked down. There was a small crack in the glass floor. She raised Phil’s torch high above her head in both hands.

She hurled the torch at the crack in the floor as hard as she could. 

It shattered like a wine glass under a guillotine.

Tiny shards of glass sprayed up like a crashing wave of thousands of diamonds. Empress flailed, a gunshot firing pointlessly through the wall. Marceline peered over the edge of the gaping hole into the courtyard, watching Empress fall into the pond with the shower of crystals. Suddenly silence fell, the glass settled, a cold draft wafted up at Marceline’s face like the icy breath of a sentient snow monster blowing cigarette smoke in her face.

‘Marceline?’ Bonnie called. She was standing over Hierophant, who was clutching his crotch and grovelling She had a fencing sword in one hand and a poker in the other. The relief of seeing her face was overwhelming. She looked pretty fucking cool, too.

‘Was that a gunshot? Are you alright?’

‘I’m fine. Are you hurt? You’ve got blood all over you.’

‘I’m fine, it’s nothing.’

Marceline felt a yellow pit of concern open up in her throat. ‘It doesn’t look like nothing. It looks like blood.’

‘Have you got the bass?’ Classic Bonnie, dodging the question.

‘Almost. Where’s the car?’

‘Meet me at the bottom of the stairs as soon as you can. I’ll take you to it,’ Bonnie called, and then ran from the courtyard. Marceline tip-toed her way around the edges of the hole in the floor, towards suite number 6, to finally retrieve the bass.

There it was, in all its sweet glory. Hank Handsome’s bass, sitting in its open case on a double bed all on its own. Marceline had forgotten how gorgeous it was. With a heavy heart she sealed the case shut. All over the floor were empty beef jerky packets. On the bedside table was a map that had been scrawled all over. She took that too, and pelted back down the stairs.

‘What happened?’ she asked when she saw up close the blood all across her stomach, staining her t-shirt. Marceline felt the pit get deeper. Bonnie was hurt.

‘We’ll deal with it in a later. Let’s get out of here.’

Bonnie grabbed her by the wrist, her other arm occupied with Grandad Chad’s urn, and led her through the stinking corridors back to the Chevrolet. ‘Oh, my sweet baby,’ Marceline said, running her fingers over the dent in the fender, ‘what have they done to you?’

‘Where’s Ash?’

‘Empress has him, Let’s go.’ She couldn’t care any less about Ash right now. She cared about Bonnie and about getting as far away as possible. Out of the creepy dark corridors, away from the smell of damp and the piles of ashes. ‘I’ll drive, you’re hurt,’ Marceline said. Bonnie clutched her stomach when she threw her the keys. Marceline felt several ounces of guilt sink to her feet. She heaved the garage door open with a grunt and got in the car. Bonnie’s injury meant she was struggling with her seatbelt. Without a word from either of them, Marceline did it for her.

‘I can’t believe you dated that Reagan-worshipping business-degree-drop-out loser,’ Bonnie said.

Marceline laughed in response. She turned the key in the ignition. ‘He wasn’t always so bad. Though I remember telling Keila sleeping with him was like sleeping with instant noodles.’

Bonnie grimaced. ‘What, weird dick?’

‘Nope. Done in two minutes.’

Marceline gunned the engine the whole way out of the ghost town with the windows down, making it onto the highway, music blasting out of the speakers. Unable to shake the joy out of her chest. As long as they were together, driving fast enough, with music loud enough, Marceline could believe everything was going to be fine. It was like their own kind of heaven. She looked over to Bonnie, whose shoulders had finally relaxed, who no longer exuded brimstone and fury, and wondered if she felt the same.

It was good to be back. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> pretty sure when beethoven wrote his eroica symphony he didn't think some gay teenager would be proofreading fanfiction to it.  
> to be honest i feel like these last two chapters have been kind of lame, but considering i write the main bulk of this fic when I'm in some kind of shit-brained fever, who am i to say? current drafts of later chapters are stupider and make less sense, which is the goal, but are getting longer and longer and harder to write (i had to cut some really creative dick jokes out of one of them which was a fat shame, but life is shit sometimes). also, due to real-life events, i'm going to be having a bit less time on my hands. what i've been aiming to say is: i might slow down posting to make sure this is really as terrible as possible.  
> as ever, thank you for your likes and comments, i appreciate all of them.  
> if you're reading this, i hope you're well


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